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  • 1.  Ghost Error 10008 Unexpected end of file

    Posted Feb 24, 2012 03:04 PM

    I recently ran into an issue when upgrading our ghost from Ghost 8.0 to Ghost 11.5.1.2266. Everytime we tried to restore an image from DVD on most of our Dell servers, we would get error 10008 Unexepected end of file. I ran a verify and a re-compile of the image to see if there was anything wrong with the image we were restoring and the image did not have any errors at all. When we ghostcast the image it restored fine. It only seemed to produce this error when restoring from DVD. Well the solution after many hours of troubleshooting is:

    On the DVD we were trying to restore the image with ghost 11.5.1 and loading the DOS CD-Rom Drivers and MSCDEX by using:

    c:\GHOST.EXE -clone,mode=load,src=c:\DUMMY.gho,dst=1 -sure -fx

    This used to work just fine on Ghost 8.0 but on Ghost 11.5.1 it failed.

    So after doing some research, if you use:

    GHOST.EXE -clone,mode=load,src=@CD-R1:DUMMY.gho,dst=1 -sure -fx
     

    Ghost 11.5.1 works correctly and does not fail. Come to find out reading the manual for Ghost 11.5.1 it states that Ghost no longer supports loading the CD-DVD driver in dos. So the solution was to put ghost.exe in the boot floppy and run it with:

    GHOST.EXE -clone,mode=load,src=@CD-R1:DUMMY.gho,dst=1 -sure -fx


    What's strange is when using the older ghost 8.0 script line it worked on some systems, but others it failed.

    So lesson learned: when using Ghost 11.5.1 make sure you use GHOST.EXE -clone,mode=load,src=@CD-R1:DUMMY.gho,dst=1 -sure -fx,  and copy ghost.exe to your bootable partition and you won't have any issues restoring the image.

     



  • 2.  RE: Ghost Error 10008 Unexpected end of file

    Posted Feb 27, 2012 07:05 AM

    The problem you may be running into is due to the lack of support in DOS for SATA devices. Modern hardware now comes with SATA connected optical drives and hard disks. Although the system bios often allows the hard disks to emulate the older parallel ATA interface, I've not seen an equivalent setting for optical drives.  I have also not found any DOS drivers to support SATA optical devices (although that doesn't mean they don't exist).

    Consequently, the best way forward is to move from DOS to WinPE, which in Ghost 11.5.1.2266 is based on the Vista 32 bit kernel. Thus you get native support for SATA optical devices, as well as the ability to add further drivers for SATA hard disk chipsets by adding and selected the appropriate Vista 32 bit driver files via the Ghost Boot Wizard.



  • 3.  RE: Ghost Error 10008 Unexpected end of file

    Posted Mar 02, 2012 02:57 PM

    EDT,

    Thank you for your comment and ideas. We are currently using Ghost 11.5.1 to backup and deploy images to sites all around the world. Our images need to be the type that the end user just inserts the DVD and walks away. We have been doing it this way since Ghost 8. Using WINPE is not an option for us. it takes to long to restore a ghost image and poses more troubleshooting issues. Symantec should keep supporting loading a DOS CDROM driver with the DOS version of ghost. Why take it out?

    Almost all of our systems that we image are currently using SATA DVD-RW and SATA Hard Drives since Ghost 8. We had never had a prolem with this until upgrading to Ghost 11. In Ghost 8, we were using the typical DOS OAK CDROM driver that is loaded on any windows 98 boot disk or PC-DOS disk and NEVER had a problem with ghost not supporting the DVD drive or hard Drives.

    As I said, I appreciate the comments but in our case, why change the DOS CDROM driver being loaded? It was supported in Ghost 8, why not support it in Ghost 11?



  • 4.  RE: Ghost Error 10008 Unexpected end of file

    Posted Mar 02, 2012 03:57 PM

    I have to say that my experience is entirely different - I suspect it all depends on the legacy support in the bioses of the systems you have been using. I found that Lenovo machines, for example, would not work at all with the OAK CDROM driver on their SATA optical drives.  DOS is not a Symantec product so they have of necessity had to provide WinPE to allow users with modern hardware to continue to perform imaging operations. I am not sure why you feel that WinPE is not an option - OK, it takes a few extra seconds to boot, but once booted, the ability to transfer data is just as efficient as DOS, and often more so when you leverage the additional benefits of a modern operating system. It is trivial to create a bootable USB device, whether flash memory or portable hard disk, to image from, and it's substantially faster than optical as well as being reprogrammable when builds are updated. The capacity is also substantially higher than even BluRay media. WinPE also allows you to build a GUI if you need one, using HTA files.

    The Ghost development team was disbanded a few years ago, but you can find many past postings by one of the Ghost developers (Nigel Bree) which can give you the full picture of the history of Ghost development.