How to backup my notebook with Ghost ?

Question 1:
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First, I only have the free Ghost.exe for DOS., and I want to back up my boot partition in my notebook Dell E1405 with DVD burner (no floppy). My intention is to back it up to a DVD, and make it bootable.
As I have just finished backing up my XP partition to an external USB harddisk, I question myself : How do I make a bootable Restore CD for this if I don't have the DOS driver for the DVD+RW ?
Usually with desktop & cdrom, I make a bootable CD which automatically loads oakcdrom.sys to load my cdrom driver in DOS, and then restore a ghost imagefile to my hd.

How can I do this with my E1405 ? I don't see a DOS driver for Dell DVD+RW.

Question 2 :
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Can the full version of Norton Ghost 10 make a working bootable DVD that will work with my Dell DVD+RW drive ? Doesn't Norton need a correct DOS driver for the DVD+RW to achieve this ?


Is there any way I can make this work using only the free DOS Ghostpe ?
Any ideas ?

I personnaly dont think using ghost is worth it. Id much rather see your learn how to make unattended installs of windows and then have a very quick installer which will include everything that you may want. It much eaiser to add updates to and faster as well.

Ghost is OK for a workstation enviorment but this is your home pc, you would be better off with a unattended install.

There is no real specific driver for optical drives in DOS like there are in Windows. One driver will usually work for all other types of drives, they only really see the interface. Oakcdrom.sys, along with mscdex.exe, will work fine. You can do it the same way you do it with your desktop.

It works. I just use oakcdrom.sys like I usually do to create a bootable restore CD, and it works without a problem. Never thought of it. Thanks guy.

VP...

I wasn't sure what you were talking about so I looked it up and here is the information on how to do it.

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/

THe main purpose of ghosting is to avoid installing everything all over again. Not to mention that all my applications and XP itself are highly customized to suit my work pattern and liking. If I have to do it all over again, it takes too much times for me. Sometimes I play games too, and sometimes games causes crashes, etc, and I have to try different version of drivers to solve game issues. All these factors can slowly degrade the O/S stability as a whole. Viruses, spyware, malwares, etc...all these craps further worsens the situation. By ghosting an image in my laptop, all it takes is to restore from cdrom/dvdrom which takes only 10 minutes rather than 10 hours from scratch.