Ghost Solution Suite

Windows 2008 Server, I need to migrate NTFS boot/system partition to a new physical disk (and I've used Ghost for many years for this kind of thing).  However, I also need to make the partition BIGGER... thanks to the gazillion patches that MSFT pushes my way, the partition is overcrowded.  I have Ghost 15.  Will it do this for me?  Again... this is W2K SERVER, which such tools as Partition Magic balk at because they want me to use their high $$ server license version.  Sadly, this machine is simply a desktop machine I bought from Dell years ago, which was accidentally loaded by them with Server instead of Workstation... and I've been beat up by this "server versus workstation" license over and over and over because of it (ie, installing some app that balks because it reads OS version and sees it's server and halts) :(

Thanks in advance.

Please locate the sticky posting at the top of this forum which points to the Norton Community where Norton Ghost is supported. This forum is for the corporate version of Ghost, not the retail version, as they are based on different technologies.

Personally, I would not use the retail version of Ghost on a server - the chances of losing the partition are way too high.

Thanks for the pointer to the Retail Ghost forum.

I'm curious as to what you believe are the differences between a "server" partition and a non-server one, and/or the contained filesystem.  GPT/UEFI/MBR all seem to be identical from the MSFT literature I've reveiwed.

It is less about the partition and more about the hardware and the operating system. It may be less of an issue since you have a desktop machine rather than a server, but again, are you using a RAID array or just a single disk?  Presumably the machine you have is a high end workstation as I would not have thought that DELL would accidentally put a server operating system on a low spec machine. So in order to resize the partition, you need to do it from a separate boot environment, and it has to be something like WinPE as DOS does not understand GPT or UEFI and also has some serious limitation on the volume size it can address. When using WinPE, it may be necessary to provide the appropriate drivers for the hardware you are booting, especially if the tool you are using is quite old and therefore unlikely to have any compatible drivers in its library.

I recently moved my Win 7 64 bit boot partition (ie same vintage as W2K8 ) from a 128Gb SSD to a 256Gb SSD for space reasons. I used Paragon Partition Manager 2012 which was dirt cheap and handled the disk to disk copy, and the subsequent resizing operation, without any issues at all.  Conversely, a similar operation I tried on a normal Lenovo laptop hard disk using Ghost 15 failed to even recognise the disk as having partitions because it could not figure out the Lenovo boot sector. It's not as if Lenovo are a small manufacturer of machines either.

So when it comes to critical disk operations, I would always go for a product that is bang up to date and understands all the latest technologies in use in modern hardware.