Does the Ghost Solution Suite support Windows operating systems that are using Dynamic Disks?

 

Symantec Ghost Solution Suite supports backing up, restoring, and cloning simple or mirrored volumes on dynamic disks in Windows 2000 / XP / Vista / 2003 / 7 / 2008R2.



Technical Information
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite supports backing up, restoring, and cloning simple or mirrored volumes on dynamic disks. Spanned, striped, and RAID-5 volumes are not supported by Symantec Ghost. You can back up an image of a partition on a disk in a dynamic disk set to an image file. If you back up a disk, then all of the partitions that Ghost supports on the disk, and only those partitions, are backed up to an image file.

Operations that support dynamic disks are as follows:

• Partition-to-partition
• Partition-to-image
• Disk-to-disk
• Disk-to-image
• Check image
• Check disk
• CRC32
• CRC32 verify

You can restore an image of a dynamic disk only to a basic disk, not to a dynamic disk. After you have restored the image file to a basic disk, you can then use Windows Disk Manager to convert the disk to a dynamic disk.

To delete a dynamic disk, use GDisk. Use the switch gdisk /mbr /wipe to delete all partitions from the disk. This method destroys all data on the disk.

You can also take a disk image of a dynamic disk if you use the image all (-ia) switch. The -ia switch performs a sector-by-sector copy of the entire disk. The disk on which the image is to be restored must be identical to the source disk in every way. This function is only useful for creating a backup. If you restore an image created using -ia onto a drive with different geometry, Windows cannot interpret the dynamic disk.

If you restore an -ia disk image of a dynamic disk onto a SCSI hard drive and you receive a Destination drive too small message, you must load the ASPI driver for the SCSI card. Without an ASPI driver, Symantec Ghost does not always detect the correct size of the SCSI drive and cannot determine whether the drive is large enough to hold the image.

Note: Use the -ia switch with caution because it is slow and the image file would be very large.