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Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

  • 1.  Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted May 30, 2007 04:41 PM
    Hello,
    I am trying to make a solution for some of our users to re-ghost their machines whenever they like from an image saved on a portable WD USB HDD. We have several users who are using Dell M70's, they want to be able to a bootable CD that will allow these users to ghost their machines and store the image on their Portable USB HDD. Then if they are ever in the field and need to re-image their machine for whatever reason they should be able to pop in the CD with the USB HDD attached bring up ghost and image their machine from the image on the USB HDD.. Is this possible without too much work? Seems like I should be able to just open up the Ghost boot wizard select "Create CD/DVD Startup Package with Ghost" option run it and it should work. But for some reason Ghost is unable to recognize the USB Drive even though the Bios can recognize the disk. I am finding that Symantec's site is very difficult to navagate and find solutions to my issues without contacting them directly.
    Thanks for your help ahead of time
    Rob
     


  • 2.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 01, 2007 02:20 AM
    Hi Rob,

    It is possible Ghost may not be able to recognize the drive under some conditions, usually it is the combination of Computer and USB Device.

    Your USB external drive is formatted in NTFS or FAT32?

    If it is FAT32, would you get a drive letter assigned when you boot to DOS?

    If it is NTFS, it would show in the menu with the notation Drive.partition (For example 2.1) -So when you go to drive menu, you only get something line 1.1 (for the hard disk partition)?

    Other option is using Windows PE and Ghost32 - Windows PE has better support than DOS for devices. Did you consider that?

    Krish


  • 3.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 01, 2007 10:22 AM
    I did try the WinPE option with Ghost32 and I could see the drive if I went into the disk integrity checker within Ghost but I could not see this as a drop down when trying to restore the image. The drive is formatted as Fat32. I was however able to use WinPE and Ghost32 and use an already created image copy the image and spanned files to the C:\ drive rename the spanned files.ghs to like M70_0108.ghs and M70_0109.ghs which Ghost said it was looking for and restore from an image on the HDD but I could only have it delete the files when it was finished. That worked pretty good however it was a little more work than I had hoped for. I am trying to re-format the drive in NTFS and I will try it that way. The USB drive is a 160GIG Western Digital Passport in case this does not work maybe Symantec can put something on their site saying that these drives are not compatable with their product 100% or try to make it compatable in their next revision, but I am sure nobody would be able to find that information very easily on the support site. They should break out their support sites so info might be easier to find. In any case I will let you know what the results are.
    Rob


  • 4.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 01, 2007 11:28 AM
    OK all,
    After formatting this USB drive with NTFS the USB drive is available in ghost.
    --Rob


  • 5.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 02, 2007 10:20 PM
    Hi Rob,

    It looks like DOS did not assign a drive letter for FAT32 volume for some reason. But in that case I expected you will be able to use it from dirve.prtition format.

    Though the problem is solved with the NTFS workaround, if you happened to use a FAT32 drive, could you try exiting Ghost and running Gdisk? It should show drive letters too.

    Krish


  • 6.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 04, 2007 11:58 AM
    Hello Krisha,
    I tried using the Gdisk on a drive that had not been formatted in NTFS (it is still FAT32). Gdisk did not give me any drive letters when I try Ghost32 the drive shows up when picking partitions to ghost but does not show up as a partition to put the image on.
    Seems like a bug to me.
    --Rob


  • 7.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 06, 2007 03:39 AM
    Hi Rob,

    I will try to re-priduce this. Since you can access the disk with NTFS partition, it should not be a hardware problem.

    It almost looks like DOS is not recognizing the drive when it is FAT32 (probably it is a single 160GB partition), but I will have a look.

    Krish


  • 8.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 06, 2007 03:27 PM
    Krish I see I never mentioned that I am booting from a WinPE CD so I am actually I believe using a newer "DOS" type Version (windows xp DOS)  that should be able to see the larger 160GB partition
    --Rob


  • 9.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 07, 2007 01:03 AM
    Hi Rob,

    Thanks for the clarification, but now I am little confused :-)

    Does this mean,

    1. If you boot to DOS, you can't see USB drive when it is FAT32.
    2. If you boot to WinPE, you can see USB drive if formatted to NTFS.
    3. If you boot to WinPE, and if the USB is formatted to FAT32, you can see the drive, but Ghost32 does not show it as a possible destination to store the image.

    Is that correct?

    Krish


  • 10.  RE: Creating Bootable CD for ghosting a bunch of Dell M70's

    Posted Jun 07, 2007 10:30 AM
    Hello Krish,
    My Laptop does not floppy support, I was unsuccessful in creating a Ghost Boot CD so I decided to use WinPE. It basically boots to a Dos Like environment. WinPE has had no issues seeing the drive no matter which format (FAT32 or NTFS), I am able to get to it no problem in WinPE. It is just when I use GHOST32 that I have the issues. GHOST32 has an issue seeing the drive as a possible image file write location, but it does see the drive when it asks which disk I would like to create an image from.
    I hope that clarifies the confusion
    Rob