In it you’ll find a file called “ghost.env”. If you run into this problem, change into the directory Norton Ghost 2002 was installed into. I wondered if the serial number might be accessible elsewhere… 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. Tried running it in Win98 compatibility mode same nonsense. I was greeted with “you can’t run this under windows NT, boot to DOS”. Simple enough, so I opened a command window and tried to run the program. 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. I normally don’t throw that stuff away, so was confused. I looked on the install CD and the manual – no 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. The PC-DOS environment loaded nicely, and then Norton Ghost started to load. I took the bootdisk and used it in the machine I wanted to perform the disk copy on.

I installed the software on my XP box, and created a bootdisk. It came with Norton SystemWorks Professional (for XP! it said so!), and I had used it before with Windows 98 boxes. I had an older copy of Norton Ghost that I knew would be perfect. I needed to do a partition-to-partition copy between two disks.

Norton ghost latest dos version