Hi,

I downloaded the 'g4l' iso, burned it to a blank CD, booted off from it and started imaging my laptop's drive out to a USB hard drive.

The only problem is: it filled up my USB hard drive really quick.

I'm used to Norton Ghost creating images of just the stuff that is actually taking up space. So the images are not that big. For some reason, g4l wants to store the whole hard drive space, whether empty or not.

Can someone give me some guidance on how to make g4l behave like Norton Ghost?

Thank you for your help.

There are some similarities, but the big difference is that programs like g4l and g4u are bit level image programs. They use the dd program to disk and partitions, which includes sectors that are currently in use or not. Since these sectors all contain data, every sector is backed up, and if they contain random data it takes a lot of space. Using one of the various programs to clear the unused space will make a huge difference.
Doing an image of an uncleared 80GB disk created a 12GB image. Clearing the free space resulted in a 2.5GB image. There are some some text files included that explain how to do this, and programs like cleandrive and blank6.exe are included.