Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

I would like to create a DVD image using only the following:

1.) My .gho image

2.) Ghost.exe

3.) CDBOOT.IMG

4.)BOOT.CAT

We have a DVD that has been made using only these files, however the image is old. I can easily create a DVD with the 4 files, but what additional step do I need to do to make it bootable? What program can I use to create this?

I own Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, however every time I try to create a DVD I get complaints because the .GHO image cannot be more than 2GB, but I do NOT want to have a spanned image, as it requires a prompt in the middle of restoring an image.

If someone could give me a solution with either a way to do this with Solution Suite 2.5, or explain how I can make this DVD I have bootable, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Ghost Boot Wizard will not handle files larger than 2GB.Please create a regular iso boot image and  

edit the iso using any software and add files and create bootable DVD 

Dpak

Are you *sure* that Ghost cannot handle files larger than 2Gb? 

2Gb is the DOS limit for filesize, but there is no such limit for files stored on NTFS file systems.

I use a very old edition of Ghost (8.3) on a USB device that boots to WinPE, and I can create single GHO files of 4 or 5 Gb without any issues. 

RISOS

You need to be careful nowadays when creating bootable optical media as many new machines ship with SATA DVD drives, and therefore you will have problems if booting with PCDOS as PCDOS does not support SATA and I have yet to find any DOS drivers that can mount a SATA DVD.

You can certainly create a WinPE boot DVD but you will find that the WinPE boot system will take up substantially more space than PCDOS, and you will need to allow around 200Mb for the WinPE files. There is nothing to stop you using a dual layer DVD - sure they are slightly more expensive but you can store sooo much more on them.  Also, if you have both GHO and GHS files on the same media, you don't get prompted to change media, as Ghost will just restore the files in sequence as long as it can find them.  So if you find you are limited to 2Gb files, you just put all the files onto your dual sided DVD - assuming your image is not greater than around 7.5Gb or so.

This corresponds to the iso limitation which is explained in the document mentioned below

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH110486

There are many limits in the Ghost Boot Wizard, some of which are more complex than the KB article linked above acknowledges. However, the basic problem is that the Ghost Boot Wizard in GSS 2.5, as in earlier versions, comes from code which only writes a basic ISO 9660 Level 1 filesystem; it's that specification which has MS-DOS style limits of 11 uppercase ASCII filename characters and limits the size of an individual file to 2Gb.

Of course, all of this can be (and was, at the cost of rewriting the entire optical drive subsystem of GBW and Ghost from the ground up) overcome, but being a ground-up rewrite it wasn't something that could just be dropped into the GSS 2.5 code line without consequences.

The end result is that although in principle these limits shouldn't exist (and there's code around which doesn't have them), it's not something that GSS 2.5 is likely to ever support - it's likely to be more of a 3.0 thing, and unless a 3.0 version is (re-)announced I wouldn't expect a solution to this.

A more complex issue along this line, since the original post mentions plain GHOST.EXE, i.e. the DOS executable, is that if you boot the DOS version of Ghost then if you use MSCDEX.EXE to access the CD you're stuck with the ISO 9660 Level 1 limits. As it happens, GHOST.EXE has its own direct CD reading code, but that too was limited to ISO 9660 Level 1 just as the writing code was (and had a collection of other really strange quirks). This means that in the context of DOS, even if you were to use a tool which would *write* ISO 9660 level 3 filesystems, there's no way the DOS-based Ghost.exe could read them, you would need to use WinPE or Linux.

Hi Dpak,

Thanks for the link - it covers all the GSS limitations coherently.