Thought I would take a moment to post some instructions for making your own Ghost USB recovery drive. I’ve done the leg work of putting together the files that make up the internal workings. Ghost can be used if you want to make a copy of your hard drive to be able to restore later. This is especially helpful when you’ve just reinstalled your computer, want to upgrade a hard drive or frequently do things that might cause unwanted changes. Like installing a new beta version of Windows, surfing on a site you shouldn’t be or downloading a file from a bogus website with no antivirus protection. The list is endless of things you can do to cause problems to your PC.

System Preparation

Please make sure you follow these steps before doing anything with the Ghost USB drive. The goal here is to have the computer in a pristine state before you begin.

1. Install any updates or software you want on your PC any time you need to restore it.
2. Remove any unwanted software on your PC.
3. Get a USB drive. Keep in mind that the more software you add to one image the more storage you’ll need for your USB drive. A good rule of thumb is that if your total used space on a hard drive is 50GB, then the total size of your back image will be about 25-30GB. So there’s roughly a 2:1 compression ratio. With that being said make sure you’ve got a large USB drive. You can also use one drive to boot Ghost and write your ghost backup to another. For example, you can write to another disk in your computer as long as you’re not asking Ghost to back it up as well.

Creating the USB drive

1. Ghost USB.zip   (You’ll only be able to download this file if you’ve been given a username and password.)
2. Format the USB drive with a single FAT32 based partition, this will allow you to boot to UEFI.
3. Extra all the contents of the Ghost USB.zip file and copy those contents to the root of your USB drive.

Creating a backup of your PC:

1. Restart your computer and boot off the USB drive. I highly recommend booting UEFI.
2. If successful after a few moments you be presented with the Ghost interface. Typically a minute or two.
3. Click OK on the informational Ghost screen
4. Click Local
5. Click Disk
6. Click To Image
7. Select the drive you wish to capture the image of and select OK
8. Browse to the external device you wish to store your image on and provide a file name. I recommend “Ghost Backup”
9. Click Save
10. When prompted about compression, choose “High”.
11. Click Yes when asked if you’re ready to proceed.

Using your backup to recover your PC:

1. Click OK on the informational Ghost screen
2. Click Local
3. Click Disk
4. Click From Image
5. Browse and select the image you wish to deploy and click OK. If you picked Ghost Backup it should be easy to find.
6. Select the destination drive (usually Drive 1, though make sure the drive you are restoring is the correct model and size).
7. Click OK, and proceed with image restoration. This may take some time depending on your USB drive and hard drive speeds.