Binary Research developed GHOST in
Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India. Technologies developed by 20/20 Software were integrated into GHOST after their acquisition by Symantec in April 2000.
GHOST 1.0 and 2.0 GHOST 1.0 and 1.1 were released in 1996, followed by 2.0 (2.07) in the same year. These versions supported only the cloning of entire disks. They could run on an IBM XT and without extended memory. They also worked with
OS/2.
GHOST 3.1 Version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual
partitions. GHOST could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. GHOST allows for writing a clone or image to a second disk in the same machine, another machine linked by a parallel or network cable, a network drive, or to a tape drive. 3.1 uses 286 with XMS and could still run on OS/2.
GHOST 7.0 / GHOST 2002 Released March 31, 2001, Norton GHOST version 7.0 (retail) was marketed as Norton GHOST 2002 Personal Edition.
GHOST 7.5 Released December 14, 2001, GHOST 7.5 creates a virtual partition, a DOS partition which actually exists as a file within a normal Windows file system. This significantly eased systems management because the user no longer had to set up their own partition tables. GHOST 7.5 can write images to
CD-R discs. Later versions can write
DVDs.
Symantec GHOST 8.0 GHOST 8.0 can run directly from Windows. It is well-suited for placement on bootable media, such as
BartPE′s bootable CD. The corporate edition supports
unicast,
multicast and
peer-to-peer transfers via
TCP/IP. GHOST 8.0 supports NTFS file system, although NTFS is not accessible from a DOS program.
Transition from DOS The off-line version of Ghost, which runs from bootable media in place of the installed operating system, originally faced a number of driver support difficulties due to limitations of the increasingly obsolete 16-bit
DOS environment. Driver selection and configuration within DOS was non-trivial from the beginning, and the limited space available on floppy disks made disk cloning of several different disk controllers a difficult task, where different
SCSI,
USB, and CD-ROM drives were involved. Mouse support was possible but often left out due to the limited space for drivers on a floppy disk. Some devices such as USB often did not work using newer features such as USB 2.0, instead only operating at 1.0 speeds and taking hours to do what should have taken only a few minutes. As widespread support for DOS went into decline, it became increasingly difficult to get hardware drivers for DOS for the newer hardware. Disk imaging competitors to GHOST have dealt with the decline of DOS by moving to other recovery environments such as
FreeBSD,
Linux or
Windows PE, where they can draw on current driver development to be able to image newer models of disk controllers. GHOST 8 and later are Windows programs; as such, they can run on Windows PE,
BartPE or Hiren's BootCD and use the same plug and play hardware drivers as a standard desktop computer, making hardware support for GHOST much simpler.
Norton GHOST 2003 Norton GHOST 2003, a consumer edition of Ghost, was released on September 6, 2002. Available as an independent product, Norton GHOST 2003 was also included as a component of Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional. A simpler, non-corporate version of Ghost, Norton GHOST 2003 does not include the console but has a Windows front-end to script GHOST operations and create a bootable GHOST
diskette. The machine still needs to reboot to the virtual partition, but the user does not need to interact with DOS. Symantec deprecated
LiveUpdate support for Norton GHOST 2003 in early 2006. == Acquisition of PowerQuest ==