How can I make a bootable HD from a bootable CD? The purpose is to boot more rapidly from the HD than is currently possible from a CD.

Hello dgibble, welcome to PCHF.

I completely depends on what your trying to boot to? DOS? Nothing on the HDD at the moment?

I'm trying to boot to Ghost 10 which is on a CD (nothing on the hard drive). It appears they are booting to WIN51. The Ghost 10 CD boots well, but takes a long time, If I could boot Ghost 10 from a hard drive it would boot more quickly. There are 3 files in the root with the name Win51: Win51, Win51IA, Win51IA.SP1. How do I get them to boot on a hard drive. Do I have to format the hard disk with FAT32 file system or CDFS?

I've found Norton to be slow too, even running from a local HDD, which is one of the reasons why I quickly switched to Acronis. For this reason I can give you the basic steps of what you need to do, but won't be able to talk you through it exactly, as I no longer have Norton to test with. It is a procedure long since forgotten and rarely used.

From the top of my head, there's a number way you can do it. The easiest way to set this up is to keep the startup CD, but place the image (?.gho) onto your HDD. Select this file as your image when you want to start the process off. To create the image from scratch, using the Windows version (Advanced menu) to create a "Virtual Partition", and then create a CD that can be used "Interactively". Version 10 may also have the ability to create an interactive partition on the disk itself.

If you wanted to copy the contents of the CD onto a HDD, this will be a little more complex. In theory, formatting an already bootable disk as FAT32, copy the startup files required for FAT followed by the files from the CD might work, have not tested this. You would also need a floppy drive and a spare floppy disk to setup.
- You can download a bootable Windows 98SE floppy disk from here: Bootdisk.Com
- Start your PC using the newly created floppy disk, and use fdisk to partition the disk in Fat32
- Format the disk using the format [drive]: /s command.
- Copy the system files command.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys, msdos.sys, io.sys over to the new HDD.
- Copy the contents of the CD to the new drive.

I noticed that Ghost cannot clone a Vista drive. Can Acronis clone a Vista drive?

The latest version does yes, you thinking of moving over too?

Well I certainly need a version that handles Vista. However, I'm a little concerned that Acronis only makes backup files which can be restored to another drive. I am more interested in CLONING a drive to eliminate the intermediate step. Can Acronis clone a drive?