Using Ghost to restore or for new drive question

I use Ghost to make image copies of my drive onto an external drive incase mine crashes. I am about to reformat and reload windows and possibly get a bigger drive. I am thinking of just restoring files and not the image as a whole, but if I WAS going to restore an image, how does that work?

I mean, if I have a drive that crashes or gets corrupted and I need to restore an image, or say I buy a new drive and want to put the saved image onto it, how do I use Windows and Ghost to restore to a new internal drive if Windows is not already on the internal drive. Does that make sense?

 

in other words, how to I restore a whole image (Windows and all) to an internal drive that is blank (as in new) or corrupted. Wouldnt I need that internal drive functioning with Windows to even USE Ghost to see the image I have saved on another drive?

I cant figure out how to word my question right....

 

Start Ghost and read the help. The Ghost help will tell you how to boot from the CD and start Ghost. A new hard needs to be formated.

 

then why does the manual say this under copying the hard drive:

"When your new hard drive is installed, you are ready to copy your old hard drive to the new one. The new hard drive does not need to be formatted. "


I was actually just asking a question about the process in general. Is it that you boot off a CD and that program sees both the old drive (with the image) and also sees the new HD and you can go from one to the other? And what if I want to keep my little utility partition, can I just copy it over under Ghost or do I need to "create" the partitions using something else (dont know how to do that.

I think what Im going to do is buy a bigger drive, install windows from my Dell XP CD, and restore all the other stuff (mail, pictures, docs, etc) from the save but not as a whole image as Id like a fresh install of Windows. I just dont konw about this partition business.

 

Depends on the configuration, normally you'd have the internal drive, and the ghost image somewhere.

Depending on where the images are depends how you have to boot and how you have to put the image on, I normally at least partition first because I want to make sure I have the right sized partitions, if you only use one partition you wouldn't do it that way.

 

You should be able to just load the image onto a new, larger drive. You can resize the partitions afterwards (including expanding the main partition to the whole drive) by using a program like PartitionMagic, or qtparted/ gparted.