Ghost Solution Suite

Hello All

I have been using Ghost for several years. I was using Ghost 2003, until any new image I created would result in a flashing cursor when that newly created image was loaded back down onto the PC

My workflow:

using a bootable USB drive with MS-DOS, I would map network drives to a NAS that stored all my images

Then I would create the image using "high" compression ("Disk to Image")

Since the failures began, I have tried ever switch possible - no difference

no errors when image is created on downloaded back onto PC

why does Ghost just stop working ???

I have even tried 11.5.1 and discovered it won't even access the NAS (even though it shows the mapping)

but ready to pull all my hair out ...

John

It would help to know which operating systems you are deploying. However, the most likely cause of your woes is the MSDOS operating system which ran out of steam years ago and is really not up to the task of working with modern hardware. Machines now ship with SATA hard disks which MSDOS cannot access, and also SATA optical drives, for which support under MSDOS is almost non existent.

Some machine BIOSes provide a compatibility mode which enables SATA hard disks to look like the older parallel ATA devices but this does not always provide an entire solution. Turning off AHCI can help, as long as you remember to turn it back on when the O/S is up and running.

There are other "barriers" - the limit of 32 bit disk addressing is around 132Gb - a limit which affected the original release of XP but has been overcome in later releases by some cunning INT 13 code, but MSDOS does not have any of this.  Users have also reported that even with 11.5.1, an MSDOS boot does not appear to be able to create a Ghost image greater than about 27Gb in size.

So there you have it. Technology moves on, and MSDOS has been replaced by WinPE, which has much better hardware support as it is based on recent operating system kernels.

Have a look at this article:  Adventures with WinPE Symantec Connect  

Using this, you can make bootable USB devices, both keys and hard disks, that boot WinPE V2 instead of MSDOS. I have used Ghost 2003 under this version of WinPE with some success, and since WinPE can run on NTFS as well as FAT32 media, you can generate single large GHO files (on NTFS) if that's what you prefer. WinPE also has better support for modern NICs. However, from a performance viewpoint, you may well find that building from a locally connected USB hard disk with the image library installed on it, is much quicker than over a LAN. With USB-3 disks and interfaces appearing on new machines, you can get some serious performance from a locally connected USB-3 drive on a USB-3 port.

Thank you for your reply

the OS I use is XP Professional SP3

what causes me to scratch my head is:

using a PC that I have created many sucessful images from and then put those images back onto .... now any newly created image no longer works - old images do ... I have change nothing with my workflow

nothing has changed on PC either

I am trying the USB drive as I type - if sucessful, it just means an additional step to archive the images to my RAID server for protection

here's hoping .......

Clearly something **has** changed otherwise there would be no need for a new image. Have you updated drivers for the hardware being used?  Have you installed recent Windows updates? Is the drive partition set as "active" ?

I can only think of the Microsoft Updates that have changed on the system

I will next image a system with a known good "old" image and create a new image without any changes to system whatsoever - hopefully that will be sucessful

still for a "ghosting" software to not be able to restore a know working system is indeed troubling

regardless of what software is on the drive ... if the drive boots the OS, the ghosting software should be able to image that drive and put it back onto the same drive

There are a number of different Ghost switches to cope with various architectures and hardware configurations.

It is perfectly possible to create a Ghost image of a working machine that will not work correctly when restored, as the image creation process makes certain assumptions that may not be true of the system(s) you are working on. A number of the Ghost switches modify those assumptions so that an image is created in a different way.  If your hardware has changed you may need to use different switches to handle these changes.

Certainly, I would expect old images that previously worked to be able to be deployed to the old hardware that they previously worked on, but those same images may not necessarily work on new hardware with substantially different components and controller chips.

one thing i noticed with a couple pieces of hardware (almost always laptops) was that when i had the blinking white cursor after ghosting, Ghost never set a target partition as active to boot into.  If i did that with diskpart, it came right up.  I dont know if this is your issue, but I did have a problem with the blinking white cursor and this was it for me.  It wasnt even consistent, that was the worst part.  Sometimes it would be fine, sometimes it was the cursor