I needed to do a partition-to-partition copy between two disks. I had an older copy of Norton Ghost that I knew would be perfect. It came with Norton SystemWorks Professional (for XP! it said so!), and I had used it before with Windows 98 boxes. Perfect, off I go.<\/p>\n
I installed the software on my XP box, and created a bootdisk. I took the bootdisk and used it in the machine I wanted to perform the disk copy on. The PC-DOS environment loaded nicely, and then Norton Ghost started to load. It asked me for a serial number. Wait, what? When you create a boot floppy for Ghost 2002, you must enter your license number every time, and it’s keyed to the install on your PC. Hooray!<\/p>\n
I looked on the install CD and the manual – no number. I normally don’t throw that stuff away, so was confused. I read through the manual and was told that the license number would appear in the splash screen every time I started GhostPE.exe on the machine I installed the software on. Simple enough, so I opened a command window and tried to run the program.<\/p>\n
I was greeted with “you can’t run this under windows NT, boot to DOS”. Tried running it in Win98 compatibility mode; same nonsense. I didn’t really want to create another boot disk and boot my PC into DOS, mainly because I had already endured the reboot process on my XP box twice from installing the floppy (who uses floppies anymore), creating the norton bootdisk, removing the floppy, and re-installing it in the machine I was ghosting the partitions in. I wondered if the serial number might be accessible elsewhere…<\/p>\n
Sure enough, it is.<\/p>\n
If you run into this problem, change into the directory Norton Ghost 2002 was installed into. In it you’ll find a file called “ghost.env”. Look at the line labeled “Keycode”. The 12-digit alpha-numeric value is what you need.<\/p>\n
Apparently this was only done with Norton Ghost 2002. Hopefully it’s because the users tracked down the product manager or business wonk who thought it was a great idea to put that little hook in to prevent piracy, and disemboweled them with a rusty spoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I needed to do a partition-to-partition copy between two disks. I had an older copy of Norton Ghost that I knew would be perfect. It came with Norton SystemWorks Professional (for XP! it said so!), and I had used it before with Windows 98 boxes. Perfect, off I go. I installed the software on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-to-know","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kev.needham.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}