norton ghost -n- xp

[Geriatric]

Greetings.
I am n00b here, but not elsewhere. Have been trying to figure xp and ghost out. Ghosting 9x is easy, no hal. So, in xp, can you ghost it succesfully and format the disc and reinstall it? What parameters are used or not used. Does the disc size (hdd actual size, or part. size) have to be exactly the same? I have tried it a few times but am unable to get past the hal. I have tried sysprep, but that does not seem to do the trick. I have also tried some different tricks I learned whilst googling to remove the hal and then reinstall it before bootup, to put the ghost on another machine. I have not been succesfull in any attempt. I can ghost 98se on with cd in 5min or from hdd in 3 min, plus driver loadup if on a different rig. Then do an xppro upgrade. But, I have a lot of computers and I am tired of tweaking everyone that I upgrade as well. My goal here is to be able to have a "generic" ghost of xp that I can put on anyone's machine quickly, and then put in their "legal" numbers and such. So many people want to upgrade an older 500-700mhz to xp, and it usually takes longer than I can really charge them. Then I want to make a "tweaked" setup, so I can do all that stuff one time and not have to do it again. If I mess the registry up too bad from playing, or trying wierd stuff, just ghost it back.

But, I cannot figure out how to get it to ghost back to the same machine or a different one.

Any thoughts?

One more wierd one. Sometimes I use a generic 98se ghost from a 4gig drive. Only 158mb image, but when I ghost from image to disk, or to partition, it gives me a 4gig drive, as seen from the bios and from the OS. I have been sticking it in an xppro machine and doing a scandisc (i think that's what it is anyway) and xp will find the true size and rebuild the mbr I suppose. An fdisk /mbr does not do it. Partition magic sees it sometimes, but I have had trouble getting that to change those size parameters. It seems to do it on drives more than a year old, and especially on boards with older bios'es. Any thoughts on how I can burn an image that will free me of that problem, or whatever cures that?

Thanks ahead of time.

By the way, it is all FAT32, except servers & workstations.

[Siliconjunkie]

I have used ghost with XP and NTFS with no problems other than the SID which wouldnt cause what you are seeing. My uses arent automated, I boot off of a Ghost floppy and pull the image off a ghost server. But, I have grown and shrunk the partition without an problems when I upgraded a 9 gig drive to a 120 gig.

[[A3D]Hatswitch]

What version of Ghost do you have? 2003 is the best version thus far, as it lets you clone to NTFS partitions (previous versions did not).

FYI, 2002 had the stupid key you had to enter every time you used it.