Norton Ghost 9.0 and Partition Magic 8.0 Bundle Description:

Norton Ghost 9.0 and Partition Magic 8.0 Bundle review:
5 stars (Does the job well) - The product works great, and I was able to restore my hard drive once. One caution is that you will not be able to restore your hard drive over a wireless network using Ghost. The actual copy was flawless, so thumbs up!



The Partition Magic/Boot Magic suite is sort of the industry standard that has been trusted for ages, and it works very well, if you know how to use it. Partitioning your hard drive is not something to be taken lightly (if you mess up you will probably have to spend multiple hours fixing things), so it is important to have a good backup copy, which is what Norton Ghost is for. Be careful when uninstalling Boot Magic. I had to reinstall it once, and I messed up which is why I had to restore with Ghost. Follow all instructions carefully, and the product itself is solid.
1 stars (Symantec Destroyed Powerquest) - I remember Powerquest Partition Magic 2.0, back in the days it was released as an OS/2 *and* MS-DOS utility you could boot and use from a set of two diskettes. I got hands-on experience with Partition Magic up to version 7. Slowly they started dropping features, like HPFS file system support, for no apparent reason.



Soon after version 8 was released, the corporation dubbed Symantec -which I like to refer to as "Engulf and Devour"- bought powerquest and while I no longer used it, soon I started hearing the complaints about the new "activation scheme" in version 8.x, which insisted on "phoning home" before allowing you to use it.



And now, users are supposed to like this artificial, crippled bundle as other reviewers have said below. PQMagic and Powerquest Drive Image have been always superior to Symantec's Ghost products. The era of small powerquest utilities that would fit on a diskette is gone.



It's sad to see such a great company and their products destroyed by Symantec's corporate greed. Welcome to the Symantec partition resizing utility monopoly!. Symantec got rid of their main competitor and destroyed a product in the process.
3 stars (Some neat features...but oddly restrictive) - While not mentioned on the packaging, Ghost 9 only works with Win2000 and XP, creating .v2i extensions instead of the older .gho ones. This means that once you use 9 to create an image, you have to have 9 on hand to salvage it.



Also, if you boot from the CD it goes to a GUI called the "Recovery Environment" for ghosting...turns out the .exe-on-floppy process we have been using for years is gone: the ghost.exe file doesn't even exist in version 9. The problem is that this GUI Recovery Environment only works with 256 megs or more of ram. Well...I work for a large university and we still have PCs running 128 megs, so this GUI interface is useless for those. Also, I don't believe you can boot from the CD and restore an image to a partition, only to an entire disk.



Version 9 does have some snazzy features and is worth owning. But I guess it's meant to be more of an enterprise ghosting-aid than a desktop repair tool. So unfortunately you will need to carry boot floppies along with this CD if you plan on ghosting both new and legacy systems.



SYMANTEC: how about combining both legacy and V9 Ghost versions on one CD, with the ability to create both floppy and CD boot-discs of each version? Oh...also provide a simple wizard to add networking to these boot discs and you'll have a perfect product.