How to keep Ghost from automatically resizing partitions

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

You cloned a disk or partition to another disk, or you created and restored an image. The partition sizes on the destination disk are different from the partition sizes on the source disk. You want to know how to ensure that the partition sizes on the destination disk are the same as the partition sizes on the source disk.

Resolution

When Ghost performs a disk clone, or restores a disk image, it resizes all partitions based on their data space requirements in relation to the free space on the destination drive. Because of the resizing, an image created from a hard drive and then restored to the same hard drive, may have different sized partitions than the original source.

To prevent Ghost from automatically resizing the partition, use the SZE switch as follows:

When the source and destination drives are the same size
If you have two drives of the same size, use the following switch to keep the partitions from being resized:

Use the SZEE switch in the -CLONE statement. For example:

GHOST64.EXE -CLONE,MODE=LOAD,SRC=G:\2PRTDISK.GHO,DST=2,SZEE

When the destination drive is larger than the source drive
If the destination drive is larger than the source, then use the following switch to keep the partitions from being resized:

Use the SZEx=F switch in the -CLONE statement, where x represents the partition number. For instance, SZE1=F tells Ghost to keep the first partition a fixed size. You can use multiple SZEx=F switches to indicate multiple partitions that Ghost should keep a fixed size. For example:

GHOST64.exe -CLONE,MODE=LOAD,SRC=G:\2PRTDISK.GHO,DST=2,SZE1=F,SZE2=F

This switch will leave any extra space as unallocated at the end of the larger drive. This can also be used with two drives of the same size.

More information
For more information on available Ghost switches, see the document Switches: Cloning and Switches: Alphabetical List of Switches.