Recovering deleted files from a ghost image

Question

Let’s suppose that we have ghost image file taken from an old hard disk and we want to burn it to a new empty hard disk. The question is: does the ghost image reflect exactly the original hard disk bitmap? so when we use a recovery solution to deal with deleted files it will be exactly as if we are dealing with the original hard disk? so we may recover deleted files which were in the original hard disk?

NOTE: It is important to suppose that the new hard disk where the ghost image is burned to was totally wiped before burning process.

Answer 1

It depends on how the image was created. If we're talking specifically about Norton Ghost, here is the quote from the KB article:

Normally, Ghost does not create an exact duplicate of a disk. Instead, Ghost recreates the partition information as needed and copies the contents of the files. Creating a copy rather than an exact duplicate reduces the time it takes to copy a disk and reduces the amount of disk space required.

Ghost uses specific switches to create more exact duplicates of the original disk. To copy the entire disk, including the entire boot track, all sectors, and unpartitioned space, and to prevent Ghost from filtering extraneous or erroneous information from the boot track, run Ghost with the -IR switch.

This also will be affected by the Ghost version, because at the end of 2003, Symantec acquired PowerQuest and Ghost 9 and higher use PowerQuest file format. So, as niceman already said, best way to know is to try.