Ghost didn't care if your drive was NTFS, FAT32, EXT2, or a weird RAID controller. If the BIOS could see it, Ghost could clone it. From Windows 2000 through Windows 7, Norton Ghost Portable was the universal skeleton key for system deployment.
Symantec acquired the technology in 1998, rebranding it as Norton Ghost 6.0 . Suddenly, every IT guy had a bootable floppy disk labeled "GHOST." norton ghost portable
Buy a lot of 20 used corporate PCs. Wipe them with Ghost’s -BLANK option, then deploy a clean Windows 7 image. Resell for profit. Ghost paid for itself a thousand times over. Ghost didn't care if your drive was NTFS,
(2010) was the last real desktop version. It added Vista/Win7 support, but it was bloated, required .NET, and constantly crashed. The portable Ghost32.exe still worked, but Symantec started adding crippleware checks —if it detected a missing license file, it would refuse to restore images larger than a few gigabytes. Symantec acquired the technology in 1998, rebranding it
But GHOST.EXE lives on. It sits on a dusty USB key in a technician’s drawer. It boots on a 486 in a basement workshop. It silently clones a failing hard drive for a retro gamer who just wants to save their Fallout 2 save file.