5 ms·

This reminds of the Ghost (was it Norton Ghost?) tool. I use to experiment with the file system and try out many many all kinds of softwares from Internet and s

This reminds of the Ghost (was it Norton Ghost?) tool. I use to experiment with the file system and try out many many all kinds of softwares from Internet and software CDs. Those CDs use to come with 100s of softwares of all kind. I use to buy them and then try out every single one of them. I use to maintain an index, using IYF, to find a software in any of those CDs. Anyway these softwares use to have there crack/patch tools with them (with music and effects and whatnot). These cracks often had virus or trojen in them. I have bored my windows many many times. Ghost helped with that immensely. I had 1 or 2 fresh install with basic setup ghost backup always available. After every bork, it only took a minute to restore my windows to fresh clean state. Kaspersky was the best anti virus back then, no other tool repaired my corrupted softwares like it. Norton anti virus use to scream only after getting infected itself. We have it lot easy now.

pixelbath 2y ago
It was simply "Ghost" before Norton bought it and made it more terrible and bloated over time. We (at a computer shop I worked at) used Ghost to build a pre-OOBE image for several common Windows configurations and then just image them to new PCs in a few minutes, then apply the license key afterward.
- nigel_bree 2y ago
  Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. Almost the entirety of the growth in the size of the imaging executable, which did get hugely bigger, came from a constant drive to add capability to the NTFS support to match the FAT support, most crucially to allow the images to be edited in Ghost Explorer. The initial NTFS support that Ghost had prior to the Symantec releases was really crude, basically the content in the .GHO file wasn't files, but a raw-ish dump of used disk extents that it tried to always put back in the same place to avoid having to fix up attribute runs, whereas the FAT16/FAT32 content was basically a file archive where all the filesystem allocation metadata got recreated on the fly. Customers wanted and pushed hard to have NTFS images editable, and that made life really hard - the approach that was ultimately taken meant creating a full read/write NTFS implementation, and those aren't small. And the design of that code interacted really badly with the C++ exception implementation in DJGPP (which before that work had begun, I had warned them about), so that eventually exception frame information was taking up ~25% of the on-disk size of the UPX-compressed binary!
unixhero 2y ago
Kaspersky was the very best, it could handle any bad case better than any of the others. I used to use the cataloging software WhereIsIt. It was really genious.
txdv 2y ago
I also reinstalled windows one too many times and used norton backup. I am not clever enough to understand that I could just do it with linux by disk dumping into an image, but hey, old times
dmd 2y ago
Ghost was descended from my absolute favorite late-90s / early 00s tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack which, as you say, let you undo absolutely anything you did to your machine. I wish I had something like it on Mac.
- Synaesthesia 2y ago
  Superduper is a useful Mac utility, as is CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)
  - dmd 2y ago
    Those are backup tools, which have little to nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
- spmurrayzzz 2y ago
  GoBack was great. I gotta believe there's a way to manually instrument this using `tmutil` to create incremental APFS snapshots and some middleware code that knows when to wait for for the FS to be idle, but that's handwaving a ton of details.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- astrostl 2y ago
  > GoBack was designed by Wild File, Inc., a company located in Plymouth, Minnesota. The software was shown at COMDEX in November 1998 and released in December 1998. > GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. ^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.
101008 2y ago
Reminded of DiskFreeze (or something ismilar, Freeze was for sure in the name), that i installed in my PC after seeing it as some cyber cafes. Basically, one partition with all the software was under this DiskFreeze, and another partition / disk where I stored documents and files. DiskFreeze restored the disk/partition with OS+software on every restart, meaning that I was infected or corrupted or anything, a simple restart would fix the machine. The trick to install a software was to disable it, restart, install it, enable it again and restart again. I only did that after installing a software and test it for a few hours or days, which of course didn't mean anything, but at least I didn't see any visible problem.
- p1mrx 2y ago
  Deep Freeze
  - userbinator 2y ago
    This: https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze
- rzzzt 2y ago
  XP had a good snapshot/restore tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState You can install a write filter on later embedded versions of Windows but this was available for home or café use as well.
  - Nexxxeh 2y ago
    The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs. Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files. The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly. If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten. RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-based-netbooks-and-adding-filesystem-integrity-with-ewftool/ https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...

pixelbath 2y ago

It was simply "Ghost" before Norton bought it and made it more terrible and bloated over time. We (at a computer shop I worked at) used Ghost to build a pre-OOBE image for several common Windows configurations and then just image them to new PCs in a few minutes, then apply the license key afterward.

nigel_bree 2y ago
Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. Almost the entirety of the growth in the size of the imaging executable, which did get hugely bigger, came from a constant drive to add capability to the NTFS support to match the FAT support, most crucially to allow the images to be edited in Ghost Explorer. The initial NTFS support that Ghost had prior to the Symantec releases was really crude, basically the content in the .GHO file wasn't files, but a raw-ish dump of used disk extents that it tried to always put back in the same place to avoid having to fix up attribute runs, whereas the FAT16/FAT32 content was basically a file archive where all the filesystem allocation metadata got recreated on the fly. Customers wanted and pushed hard to have NTFS images editable, and that made life really hard - the approach that was ultimately taken meant creating a full read/write NTFS implementation, and those aren't small. And the design of that code interacted really badly with the C++ exception implementation in DJGPP (which before that work had begun, I had warned them about), so that eventually exception frame information was taking up ~25% of the on-disk size of the UPX-compressed binary!

unixhero 2y ago

Kaspersky was the very best, it could handle any bad case better than any of the others. I used to use the cataloging software WhereIsIt. It was really genious.

txdv 2y ago

I also reinstalled windows one too many times and used norton backup. I am not clever enough to understand that I could just do it with linux by disk dumping into an image, but hey, old times

dmd 2y ago

Ghost was descended from my absolute favorite late-90s / early 00s tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack which, as you say, let you undo absolutely anything you did to your machine. I wish I had something like it on Mac.

Synaesthesia 2y ago
Superduper is a useful Mac utility, as is CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)
- dmd 2y ago
  Those are backup tools, which have little to nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
spmurrayzzz 2y ago
GoBack was great. I gotta believe there's a way to manually instrument this using `tmutil` to create incremental APFS snapshots and some middleware code that knows when to wait for for the FS to be idle, but that's handwaving a ton of details.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
astrostl 2y ago
> GoBack was designed by Wild File, Inc., a company located in Plymouth, Minnesota. The software was shown at COMDEX in November 1998 and released in December 1998. > GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. ^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.

101008 2y ago

Reminded of DiskFreeze (or something ismilar, Freeze was for sure in the name), that i installed in my PC after seeing it as some cyber cafes. Basically, one partition with all the software was under this DiskFreeze, and another partition / disk where I stored documents and files. DiskFreeze restored the disk/partition with OS+software on every restart, meaning that I was infected or corrupted or anything, a simple restart would fix the machine. The trick to install a software was to disable it, restart, install it, enable it again and restart again. I only did that after installing a software and test it for a few hours or days, which of course didn't mean anything, but at least I didn't see any visible problem.

p1mrx 2y ago
Deep Freeze
- userbinator 2y ago
  This: https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze
rzzzt 2y ago
XP had a good snapshot/restore tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState You can install a write filter on later embedded versions of Windows but this was available for home or café use as well.
- Nexxxeh 2y ago
  The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs. Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files. The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly. If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten. RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-based-netbooks-and-adding-filesystem-integrity-with-ewftool/ https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...