Although Ghost's support for multicast IP isn't new in Version 5.0, it was the most impressive feature in our tests. Although the new version of Ghost comes with GhostWalker, a utility that assigns each Windows NT workstation a unique Security ID, that's the extent of the alterations Ghost makes after the operating system has been installed. Another competitor, PowerQuest Corp.'s Drive Image Professional, includes more powerful features for manipulating drive partitions that are already in place, but Ghost's new GDisk program proved comparable for creating and formatting new partitions. Micro House International Inc.'s ImageCast, which clones only via multicast, is a better buy for large sites. We used optimal compression to simplify storing large images on removable media, such as 100MB Zip disks.
Ghost can also split an image to span more than one disk.
Creating boot disks can be more tedious than the cloning because a different disk is needed for each network adapter. Ghost lacks online help, so we set up the disks to use batch mode, thereby eliminating the need for users to do anything but insert the disks into their PCs. Ghost then partitions and formats the PCs' hard drives, so no additional preparation is required. We configured the boot disks to run Ghost's multicast IP client upon startup, so the download process began when the last PC on the network was booted. Ghost is not a replacement for conventional backup programs.