Ghost Solution Suite

so i have been trying to frigin clone a hard drive for almost THREE days now, and just keep running into problem after problem after problem.

first damn ghost wouldn't find dhcp server, fixed that

then imy source drive was twice the size of my target drive, fixed that

then i got the exact same drive for a target drive, drive sizes are identical on ghost peer to peer, BUT NO target drive too small.....whatever

take second route, load up a ghostcast server, no problem, start to create an image from source drive, no problem. get 70% done, and oh to bad ghostcode 19945, connection reset by server..... SOB!

stop everything, restart again, connect again, this time only make it to 21%.....then WHAMMO SAME ERROR...

I am attempting for a third time as i write this......I am about ready to track down the ghost progam developers and kick them in the BALLS!!!!!

anyway, please excuse my venting, if anyone can shed some light on this, it would be greately appreciated.

thanks

-Nick

There is no need to be that rude on the forum where ghost developers are trying to help you out!

As you can see "damn ghost" has nothing to do with your DHCP config - you set it up and you have to fix it. "Damn ghost" has nothing to do with your source hard drive being twice the size of your dest drive - you have to fix that. In fact ghost is quite happy to resize your partitions proportionally into the new drive so long as the data can fit - have you not seen that screen? You can also control the automatic resizing way with ghost switches - you can consult Ghost implementation guide on those.

Error 19945. What version of ghost are you using? What preOS are you using to clone? 19945 usually means that driver has dropped the connection - have you tried different/correct driver? Can you please post ghosterr.txt that "damn ghost" always generates when it encounters something unexpected? Without any useful information it is impossible to diagnose anything.

Thanks.

Are you trying to clone a drive with any sort of boot manager in place?
I found Ghost was not even able to detect the system partition on a Lenovo laptop which had their Rescue and Recovery tool installed. Apparently this uses a boot manager that is linux based but whatever the reason, Ghost just did not see the partition..
Ended up using a free partition manager tool off a magazine cover. Backed up to a USB drive, changed the HD, restored, and all was well.

I was pretty frustrated also that Ghost didn't automatically see that the source hard drive partition was larger than the destination hard drive but the data in that source partition was small enough to still fit in the destination drive and thus adjust itself accordingly without the need for me to step in with some switches.  I would suggest that this could be something that gets implemented in the 3.0 release if it's not too late for new additions.  Also there could be more help (more intuitive help) than the alphabetical switch list web page (http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/on-technology.nsf/docid/1998082612540625) for determining which switches to use in what situations.  Reading through those is pretty mind numbing and that's if you already know that it's available.  I don't think that many people are aware of this list, or even the syntax to implement them, when they first start to use Ghost.  Perhaps I missed it in the Ghost tutorial but I never saw where to put those switches in until I started using a trial and error method of clicking around and trying things out.

to eugene,

my apologies, i was frustrated. Mostly because it has cost me three days to accomplish such a simple task. I am  using Ghost 11. as to my first drive size problem, you didn't read my post very well, i said i fixed it. I didn't blame ghost for that, i was just giving background for my frustration. same goes for the dhcp, i said i fixed that and i didn't blame ghost.

as for the resizing of partitions, no, there is no screen for that. and no resizing them wouldn't help anyway, mostly because for some reason ghost wants to make an image of the whole drive and not just the data on the drive.

ghost didn't make its error txt file. for some reason...(go figure) so i cannot post it. 

i say damn ghost because: server connection reset when at 69% (i have the right drivers, having something work for 69% of the time then just quit, is crap,)

i say damn ghost because: ghost thinks 152467 is bigger/smaller than 152467

i say damn ghost because: for a multimillion dollar company, that has spent well over a million dollars developing numerous versions of the same program that performs this simple task, the above two issues are completely ridiculous.


to Edt,

Both drives have 2 partitions, one is the main and the second is like 3 mb. I have done a low level format and a standard format on the drive but i can't get it to be just one partition. I think it is normal for most drives to show a few megs of unused space.

to jonathan,

thanks for the info, i was aware of those support pages. I actually found the 'solution' to the sizing problem, but the switches they reccommended were not options on ghost 11 GUI. Unfortunately for me, i have not used ghost from a command line, but if my current attempt fails again i will look into it.

ANYWAY. my third attempt was successful, i returned to work this a.m. and the image was created successfully.
 
thank god.

thanks to everyone for your comments and help, even your critisisms.
 

To Jonathan,

Great, I didnt know we had all switches listed!

To Estberg,

Perhaps I misintrepreted your comments "first damn ghost wouldn't find dhcp server, fixed that"?

Few more notes: ghost has no control over drivers and unfortunately drivers do fail and ghost can do nothing about it. Ghost doesnt have its own universal network driver built-in. Hence why in GSS 2.5 we introduced Winpe and Linux as a preOS to eliminate numerous problem people had with DOS drivers (or absence of such).

In terms of cloning disks vs partitions - you always have this choice. Whether you clone from Ghostcast server directly or from the Console you can always specify whether you clone entire disk or just one/many partitions.

Ghost always creates ghosterr.txt on any problem. If you are running cloning task from the Console then this file is automatically deliveredto the Console. If you are cloning manually or from ghostcast server manually then this file will be on the client machine in the same folder where ghost is run from.

Resizing partitions screen - you'll see it when you are doing manual cloning just using ghost and picking image manually. When you run from ghostcast or console all automatic switches are turned on so it makes all the decisions for you.

Ghost shows you the size of the disk in MB rounded to the nearest MB. Hard disks still may differ in the number of sectors, so from ghost perspective two drives would still be different size even though they have identical size in MB from user perspective. Ghost should show you number of sectors in each hard disk, are they the same?

Cheers.