Ghost Solution Suite

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  • 1.  9GB .gho file?

    Posted Mar 10, 2009 02:34 PM

    I have been using Ghost for about 5 years now. I just started getting into it in the last 6 months. By that I mean learning what it can do, using the console and the tools and all that.

    I recently started using Windows Scheduler to run a VP that images the HDD to a USB HDD connected to said PC. Here's the kicker, all I am getting is 1 9GB .gho file instead of the normal 2.01GB multiple files.

    It was my understanding that Ghost 11.5 could not make files larger than 2GB? This .gho file does open in ghost explorer and it does restore so I'm not having any problems at this time. I would like to know whats going on and if there might be a problem later as this is for a disaster recovery backup.

    So, is this anything I should worry about?



  • 2.  RE: 9GB .gho file?

    Posted Mar 10, 2009 02:48 PM

    Cobra7,

    I noticed this, too, when imaging to an external USB device. I'm not sure exactly why it does this, but the image is fine. It seems like it forces the -SPLIT=0 switch is enabled by default when going to a USB hard drive.



  • 3.  RE: 9GB .gho file?
    Best Answer

    Posted Mar 10, 2009 10:54 PM

    > It was my understanding that Ghost 11.5 could not make files larger than 2GB?

    Actually, Ghost has been able to make larger files than this for a very long time (back at least to Ghost 7.0) it's just that by default we don't do that for reasons of compatibility, since you can't e.g. restore a 2Gb image from a DOS mapped network drive. We do adjust the rules from to time, given that newer customers in particular have quite different expectations about imaging from our older customers. Many customers discovering Ghost only recently (in the 2.x) line are quite likely not to have any idea how innately limited DOS environments or FAT filesystems are, having never personally experienced them, and so they tend to very strongly express a preference for unsplit images to be the default.

    So, the rules about exactly when images do end up split are now something of a compromise, and subject to future tweaking especially as the default OS for imaging increasingly becomes something more capable than DOS, like WinPE and Linux (as it already pretty much has, since PC hardware has drifted from the original PC such a long way and plenty of new machines can barely run a pre-ACPI operating system like DOS at all).



  • 4.  RE: 9GB .gho file?

    Posted Mar 11, 2009 12:38 AM

    Thanks guys, it was just something I had not run across before and wanted to be sure.