Ghost is a disk cloning program, originally produced by Binary Research, but purchased by Symantec on June 24, 1998. The Ghost program launched the market for disk-cloning software. The name Ghost ori... More

Ghost is a disk cloning program, originally produced by Binary Research, but purchased by Symantec on June 24, 1998. The Ghost program launched the market for disk-cloning software. The name Ghost originated as an acronym for "General Hardware-Oriented System Transfer". Symantec Ghost 8.2 Murray Haszard wrote Ghost in 1996, building on experience with a parallel and serial file-copying program previously produced by Binary Research. Initially, Ghost supported only FAT filesystems directly, but it could also copy (although not resize) other filesystems by performing a sector copy. Ghost added support for the NTFS filesystem later in 1996, and also provided a program, Ghostwalker (DOS name: ghstwalk.exe), to change the Security ID (SID) that made Windows NT systems distinguishable from each other. Ghostwalker is also capable of modifying the name of the Windows NT-based computer from its own interface. Ghost added support for the ext2 filesystem in 1999 and for ext3 subsequently.  [edit]  Less