Recommend a Brand of Floppy Disc

[average joe]

Hi,

I'm using an old version of GHOST at the office to image about 140 PC's. The PC's are scattered about 10 locations and I generally never need to image more than one or 2 systems at a time. So rather than being able to Multicast I just use peer to peer imaging with a ghost boot disc and and lug around a laptop with all 10 images on it.

The trouble I am having is that my GHOST floppies seem to go bad all the time. I'm lucky to get 3 or 4 runs before they won't boot. Often I can just rebuild them on the same disc and there good to go but now I'm always having to carry a pack of blank ones. Currently, I'm using Memorex Floppy discs which used to be a good brand. Out of a brand new package of 100 maybe 20 of them won't even format new out of the box on any machine.

Can any recommend a decent brand of Floppy Disc these days.

Also, if anyone has info on Clonezilla I'd like to know how well it works.

 

[Ijack]

Just a thought - you might want to suspect your floppy disc drive rather than the discs.

 

[vladtepes]

It's not the disks, the drives are the problem. Be sure to write protect the disks after making them bootable. Try using a bootable CD with Ghost instead. You can also get an USB floppy from Sony

 

[average joe]

I didn't think of the drives at first because so many different machines read them. But just before i start a rant about it, it occured to me that only one drive is writing them?

Do you think the drive is writing the discs weakly somehow so that they fail after a run or two?

 

[MrLinux]

Floppy disks (and drives) are just unreliable; as they decline in popularity the manufacturers have to cut quality to maintain price, and as the quality/reliability declines less people use them...

If you must use Floppy disks stick to a big name brand, keep them in a box well away from ANY electronic or electrical equipment, and be prepared to throw them away regularly.

Have you investigated using USB sticks or CD's as an alternative?

 

[average joe]

I have. The place I work purchased a retail copy of ghost 2002. It lacks the ghost32.exe file found in the corporate edition. With that file I could build a BART PE disk and run the whole thing in 32 bit mode. It would transfer files faster and eliminate the need for spanning. Currently, I have to span the image everytime I hit the DOS 2 gig limit. My average Image size is about 16 gigs compressed.

Ironically, an older retail version would have that file. But this particular version is not truly Norton Ghost but a repackaged copy Drive image. Syantec purchased the company and split thier corporate and retail packages into two seperate lines. Fortunately, they added basic support for leagacy images in at the last minute and threw in a floppy boot disc maker. Newer versions will only allow you to boot from the Ghost CD and will only read the new image files.

The boot cd sucks. It literally takes 20 minutes to boot the system verses 30 seconds for a floppy. It also doesn't have very many drivers on it and no real way to slipstream them in. They have also dramtically changed thier liscening model with the newer versions. The would run us about 5,000 a year. It's hard to justify that expense when the fix is to replace a floppy drive once in a while. The floppy drive is a Dell and its still under warrenty.

Thats why I was asking about clonezilla. It's free, does the same thing, and supports muticasting.

 

[vladtepes]

I have. The place I work purchased a retail copy of ghost 2002. It lacks the ghost32.exe file found in the corporate edition. With that file I could build a BART PE disk and run the whole thing in 32 bit mode. It would transfer files faster and eliminate the need for spanning. Currently, I have to span the image everytime I hit the DOS 2 gig limit. My average Image size is about 16 gigs compressed.

Ironically, an older retail version would have that file. But this particular version is not truly Norton Ghost but a repackaged copy Drive image. Syantec purchased the company and split thier corporate and retail packages into two seperate lines. Fortunately, they added basic support for leagacy images in at the last minute and threw in a floppy boot disc maker. Newer versions will only allow you to boot from the Ghost CD and will only read the new image files.

The boot cd sucks. It literally takes 20 minutes to boot the system verses 30 seconds for a floppy. It also doesn't have very many drivers on it and no real way to slipstream them in. They have also dramtically changed thier liscening model with the newer versions. The would run us about 5,000 a year. It's hard to justify that expense when the fix is to replace a floppy drive once in a while. The floppy drive is a Dell and its still under warrenty.

Thats why I was asking about clonezilla. It's free, does the same thing, and supports muticasting.

My suggestion was to make a DOS BOOT CD, with ghost.exe / not use the GHOST BOOT CD
Clonezilla seems very good
http://clonezilla.org/