Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,
New to GSS but familiar with the old way of ghosting i.e. spend ages creating network boot disks everytime new nic comes out, boot, connect to network, ghost to server. The hard part was always the network boot disk!!

I'm now trying to figure out the GSS console. Firstly had a problem with client not appearing in groups. That was resolved but reinstalling the client manually. Now trying to create new image.

When I create the new image task from the console using the only computer I have in the group, on the client I see the pc reboot and attempt to boot up on what I assume is the virtual partition. I am trying to create the image on a shared drive on the same server as the console...

1. Is my assumption of how this works correct - Client creates virtual partition. This boots during image creation and runs ghost to create image?

2. During the above process, can I create this image across the network back to the console server if I specifed the image location when setting up the task?

3. Could it be that I haven't used the correct NIC drivers when creating the image? I have a broadcom gigabit nic and used the suggested option which was broadcom 433??? I also tried universal and some other broadcoms.

4. Where does PXE server fit in to all of this? Do I need a PXE server to create the image over the network? Surely not?

5. I also tried a backup. I got similar result - pc reboots but this time back into windows. Before log in screen appears a message comes up to say ghost is busy. On the console, the progress is monitored. Eventually the console tells me the backup was successful however there is no backup file anywhere and if I look at the backup, it says file missing. What am I doing wrong. Sure this should be easy??

Thanks
Reno

I'm getting desperate now. Ghosting used to be so easy!!

Reno

Hi Reno,

Probably the issue is not having the correct DOS network driver.

1.When creating an image, Console will using GhostCast server. Certainly, you can create the image in the Console machine, you need not to even share the folder. We do not use mapped network drives when creating the image. Basically, Console run the GhostCast server, and Client boot to VP, run Ghost and Ghost will connect to the GhostCast session and save the image.

2.I think you have create the image definition in Ghost Console. You have to create a new image definition, and select a name and a folder to save it.


If you look at the client, you will see it is booting to DOS, and try to connect to Console. In case if it finds that the DOS network driver was not initialized (due to wrong network driver or something), it will boot back to Windows immediately, to avoid user to walk to the client machine to restart it. In this case, if you look at the task log for that task in Console, it should say 'failed to boot to recovery partition'.

When the client booting to DOS, (as you see 'Starting PCDOS' message) press F8 key. This will allow you to go step by step execution of commands. Since you have experience with boot disks, it will be pretty easy to find out where it fails, probably when initializing network driver.

Let us know where it fails, will start from there. I am not sure what happens with the backup task, but will check it after this.

Hope you will find that Ghost is still easy to use :-)

Krish

Hi there,

Thanks for the quick response. Managed to sort my problem out but was led on the wrong track a bit. Turns out there was a problem with the client on the client pc - ghost.exe was corrupt even though I installed the client several times.

When the client would reboot, the NIC would initialise ok, then I would get a DHCP error (failed to locate DHCP server - see question about this further down), then ghost.exe problem. I pushed F8, ctrl C to get into virtual partition and manually run ghost.exe which wouldn't even start.

I then switched roles between machines by installing ghost console on different pc. Ghosting worked first time no probs.

I have some questions about how Ghost works to understand it better:

1. How does the client communicate with the console server? Is this some type of broadcast? I don't understand how it managed to ghost the image across the network without receiving an IP address - can you explain?

2. What happens during a restore point creation that is different to a base line image? How does Ghost compare what it needs to put into the restore point from the complete base line image? Is this done at the console side?

3. Do restore points take quicker to Ghost than baseline image?

4. Does one require the baseline image to restore a restore point? What happens if I delete the baseline image and try restore from restore point?

Your help is most appreciated.
Reno

Hi Reno,

> 1. How does the client communicate with the console
> server? Is this some type of broadcast? I don't
> understand how it managed to ghost the image across
> the network without receiving an IP address - can you
> explain?

Client uses the IP address to communicate, if it did not get an IP, there is no way it could communicate with the server. It is a unicast packet, not a broadcast.

> 2. What happens during a restore point creation that
> is different to a base line image? How does Ghost
> compare what it needs to put into the restore point
> from the complete base line image? Is this done at
> the console side?

I think you mean incremental images in backup regims. When you create a baseline image, it takes a 'snap shot' of the drive, which contains the information about files and reg keys in the machine and stores it in the client machine. Then it creates a full Ghost image, which is the baseline image. When you run the incremental backup later, it crates another snapshot, compare it with previous one and find out what has changed. Then the changed files and registry data is sent to the Console as an incremental image.


> 3. Do restore points take quicker to Ghost than
> baseline image?
Yes, but you have to start with a baseline image, and then apply each incremental sequentially.

>
> 4. Does one require the baseline image to restore a
> restore point? What happens if I delete the baseline
> image and try restore from restore point?

Yes, you have to start from the baseline image. If it is deleted, all the incrementals till the next baseline are not useful.

Hope this helps.

Krish