Ghost Solution Suite

Hey all,

I've created two sets of boot floppies, using the boot wizard that comes with GSS 2.0.  With one set, I just chose the defaults - PC DOS - no check in the Override BIOS USB Control.  That set boots fine but I cannot see the external USB-connected hard drive.

With the second set, I checked the Override BIOS USB control.  Booting with that set gets me to the initial splash screen for ghost and then hangs, the cursor perpetually in that hourglass mode.

That external hard drive is a Htiachi 0A39289 1TB SATA drive in an enclosure that provides a SATA to USB adapter.

The system is an older Gateway server - 920 Series.  This is USB 1.1 but I can see the USB drive in question when I boot to the Windows 2003 Server OS.

Any ideas on what else I can do to get that USB drive accessible after booting with the Ghost floppies? 

TIA

You are frankly wasting your time trying to do this with PCDOS. PCDOS was never designed to support USB devices, and even if you were able to mount the USB external disk, PCDOS would not be able to access it because the capacity is way beyond the limit of what PCDOS is able to address.

Move to WinPE - you can run the DOS version of Ghost under WinPE and access USB devices and large hard disks without the limitations of PCDOS. Since you need GSS 2.5 to have the ability to create WinPE boot media through a GUI, if you are not in a position to upgrade, you can "roll your own" using the information in this article: Adventures with WinPE Symantec Connect

I've used this WinPE solution along with Ghost 8.3 (very old) to create backup images onto the USB hard disk which was formatted to boot WinPE. Since WinPE supports NTFS you can also choose to create single GHO files greater than the 2Gb limit of PCDOS.

Are you kidding?  I would consider a smaller drive or an os that can see that size of drive.   ghost does a good job but I wouldn't think it could over come those odds.  A usb 2 drive plugged into a 1.1 port with an non plug and play OS that is from the 80s trying to deal with this usb addapter to a SATA interface.    At best you will be able to make this work out in a windows pe environment using the ghost32.exe.   There isn't a canned way to make a pe disk with Ghost 2.0 but you can look into adding the ghost32.exe to a bart pe disk or you could set up a microsoft pe disk but the learning curve is a bit high.

The better option I would think would be to ghost cast this from the old gateway server to a modern piece of hardware that supports the SATA drive nativly.    I have seen a lot of usb adapters that corrupt data so be aware when working with several gig files there is a lot of room for corruption.  

best of luck.