Ghost won\’t let me use my monster hard drive!

Here’s a familiar problem, I’m sure.

You need to back up your laptop, so you buy a monster (200+ GB) USB or Firewire hard drive. And then you can’t use it in Symantec/Norton Ghost, for one of two reasons:

1. You can’t format a FAT32 partition bigger than 32 gigabytes.
2. Ghost chokes when it tries to make a file larger than 4 gigabytes.These are limits of the operating system, not Ghost. But there are workarounds.

To format a FAT32 drive bigger than 32 gigs, you need a DOS boot disk. If you don’t have a Windows 95OSR2 or Windows 98 DOS boot disk handy, you might try bootdisk.com, or download the latest version of FreeDOS, which now supports FAT32.

You’ll have to use good old FDISK and FORMAT, which is clunkier than Windows XP’s computer management, but at least it’s possible.

Ghost can choke when the image file exceeds 4 gigabytes in size because FAT32 won’t let you make a file larger than that. It’s a limit of the FAT32 file system. The workaround there is to split up the image. Pass Ghost the -SPAN -SPLIT=4095 parameters when you launch it to get around that problem.

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2 thoughts on “Ghost won\’t let me use my monster hard drive!

  • October 5, 2004 at 8:19 pm
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    Do recent editions of Ghost support USB and Firewire drives? I hadn’t thought they did. My drive image is huge – 20Gb or so, 5Gb compressed – due to Visual Studio, etc., that I install and use on a daily basis.

    • October 5, 2004 at 8:50 pm
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      Recent consumer editions do, yes. The corporate editions may not. I’ve never had occasion to try my corporate disc with a USB drive to see.

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