For disk-to-file operations, you can select a data compression of none, fast, or high. I ran several disk-to-disk and partition-to-partition cloning operations without incident and recorded an average transfer rate between IDE drives of approximately 85MB per minute. I created a DOS boot diskette, copied ghost.exe from the CD-ROM, and began testing Ghost's cloning feature on four NT 4.0 systems, two running Service Pack 4 (SP4) and two running SP5. I began testing Ghost 6.0 Enterprise Edition by running the software's basic functions, cloning partitions and drives. On Win2K and NT machines, the client software runs as a service and facilitates commands that Ghost Console issues.

An administrator can install Ghost Console Client on Win2K, Windows NT, and Windows 9x machines. Ghost Console gives administrators remote capabilities (such as remote cloning scheduling and initiation) and post-cloning configuration capabilities. Norton Ghost Console and Norton Ghost Console Client are the new additions that distinguish Ghost 6.0 Enterprise Edition from earlier Norton Ghost versions. Because ghost.exe runs only in DOS, you must create a DOS network boot disk that has a packet driver for each multicast client however, you'll save time when you need to roll out multiple PCs that have similar configurations. MultiCast Server includes a server component that uses TCP/IP multicasting to simultaneously broadcast an image to multiple PCs. Multicasting takes cloning one step further. Either method is acceptable for transferring an image file between two PCs or for cloning. Ghost's interface also lets you use a parallel port to make a peer-to-peer connection to another PC or NetBIOS running on an Ethernet or Token-Ring card. Version 6.0 supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Windows 2000 (Win2K) NTFS (nonencrypted), and Linux ext2. The software's easy-to-use graphical interface lets you copy an entire hard disk or individual partitions to another hard disk or to an image file. The Ghost 6.0 Enterprise Edition executable file, ghost.exe, runs in DOS. To build on the popularity of Norton Ghost, Symantec recently released Norton Ghost 6.0 Enterprise Edition, which includes Norton Ghost (Symantec's basic cloning tool), MultiCast Server, Norton Ghost Console, and several utilities (e.g., Ghost Walker 6.0). Since that time, competition among cloning software vendors has sparked attempts to improve on the basic cloning concept. I also remember my delight when I found a tool that let me create an image of one PC's configuration and copy the image to other machines. I remember the hours I spent configuring new PCs one by one. IT shops that haven't benefited from disk-cloning software are few and far between. Ghost's new enterprise features don't meet expectations

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