Hi Randall,
Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 ships with WinPE 2.0 - released the same time as Vista. I believe the first official support for x64 UEFI from Microsoft is in WinPE 2.1 - equivalent to Vista SP1 / 2k8.
Ghost Boot Wizard relies on WAIK tools in the directory "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Ghost\PETools" and it could be that later versions of WinPE than 2.0 also need later .wim manipulation tools. So things may work a little better by replacing the WAIK tools in 'PETools' temporarily with those from the version of WinPE that you're trying. Which version are you looking at by the way - 2.1 (vista sp1/2k8) or 3.0 (win7/2k8 sp1)?
A complication though will be that WinPE x64 unlike Full Windows x64 does not support running 32 bit processes. Ghost Boot Wizard will insist on copying/updating 32 bit binaries into the PE as it expects it to be 32 bit only. You could manually add the extra 64 bit files that you need (e.g. ghost64.exe).
This 64 bit requirement pretty much rules out running these machines under management by the Ghost Console (a number of components in the client are 32-bit only currently), however some of the standard tools should still be able to operate in x64 WinPE.
Based on this, I'd suggest using the WAIK tools to modify a x64 WinPE directly to include the ghost x64 binaries that you need, and then use the same tools to create the bootable media - this is described in the WAIK documentation.
What version of windows are you planning to run on these servers - I'm guessing it will be x64 UEFI capable, hence probably 2k8 x64? Also, could you name a model of IBM server that can be purchased now with native UEFI support? Thanks.
One option with some UEFI systems that include a Compatibility Service Module (CSM) to emulate BIOS, is to run the system in BIOS mode rather than UEFI. However I'm not sure whether the IBM server's that you're referring to have or make visible a CSM.
The UEFI boot process is quite different than BIOS. UEFI systems maintain an 'in flash' copy of the items to boot persistently. The items to boot are described by fairly specific device paths that sometimes need to be updated after an image restore - and can be updated by windows applications. When a UEFI system starts, it works through (in order) the boot entries and attempts to boot them. Each entry refers to an EFI 'application' - I believe for Vista and above the application is bootmgr.efi. This application typically resides in a special EFI system partition that is on each disk (generally the first partition and generally FAT32).
Ghost does not (yet) update the UEFI boot variables, hence you may find that you need to manually update the UEFI boot settings after restoring an image to get the operating system to boot. Partition restores may be more likely to boot without fixups than disk restores, depending on the operating system that you're trying to boot - this is due to the greater stability of the device paths in the UEFI boot variables.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Robert.