I have always used PartitionMagic and DriveImage and when PowerQuest was bought out by Symantec, I started using PartitionMagic and Norton Ghost

but this new machine of mine runs Win XP x64 edition, and neither of those programs are x64 compliant ... from what I've been reading on various forums, a lot of people have had problems running PartitionMagic in x64

so what I went ahead and did was buy a program called Acronis Disk Director, which is x64 compliant ... so I installed it and used it as a PartitionMagic replacement and it all worked

so I'm wondering whether I should give Norton Ghost a go ... or purchase the ghost-like program from Acronis which is officially x64 compliant?

I hear Acronis is pretty nice.

The tough thing with any imaging program right now is driver support for x64. In the case of Norton Ghost, you have a CD that you can boot to for recovery, but I don't know if it can actually do backup outside of the OS.

Specifically, with your system, the RAID support is going to be crucial. I know that Ghost doesn't care what OS is on the disk-- I've heard reports of success using their WinPE-based 32-bit disk to image a 64-bit OS down to a hard drive.

Considering the fact that an x64 OS runs in a standard partition type, I'd assume any of them could do the job. If I had access to my x64 box right now, I'd try it out with Ghost 10. But, of course I run into the issue that WinPE is based off of Windows XP SP1, and that doesn't natively support my nForce RAID setup...

I'm glad to hear you've heard good things about Acronis, because I was biting my lip using it to partition, because I had never heard of it before this week.

While the latest version of Norton Ghost doesn't let you make backups from outside of Windows, I also have a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 which does.

Well crud.

I thought one of the biggest strengths of Ghost was its ability to clone disks from outside of Windows. Does 2003 use WinPE? I thought it just used DOS.

I have no idea - I never tried it. Hence me asking whether it's worth giving it a go or buying the x64-supported Acronis disk imager.

Hi,

Norton Ghost 12.0 is the latest version available for XP & Vista.
You can backup the HDD while in windows mode and if you need to recover, you can use the recovery CD of Ghost.

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