Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

I have recently been tasked with creating our Ghost Images via Symantec Ghost. We have a server that we use for the imaging process and it requires that we make a Boot Disk for the different computers. I am well aware of how to create an image and push an image to the computers, however I am getting hung up on creating the boot disks for this process. Here are the basics:

We are using Symantec Ghost 11.0.2

I am attempting to use the Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard to create the disks. I need to make a disk using the Network interface wizard (which requires you load a DOS/COM driver for NIC card usage).

I am selecting a driver I know that works as the person who had this position before me has made several usable disks with this driver. (I am attempting to re-create the disks for my own education).

The process I take is as follows:

I select the Network Boot Package, the appropriate driver, PC-DOS, I do us the Firewire/USB options, I have the IP set to DHCP (we image computers on a closed network that is only attached to the imaging server), then I am prompted to make floppy disk, create an ISO, or load to USB drive.

If I select ISO, there is an option to add support for a bootable CD/DVD. I have tried this option both checked and unchecked.

When I get the image, I burn it to a disk and attempt to load it into a computer, but the computer fails to recognize it as a bootable disk. When I compare the disks I have made to a disk I know that works, there are two different files. The disks that work all have a Bootcat.bin and OSBoot.iso. On the disk that I have made there is just the ISO that I have created.

What am I doing wrong? I know it is probably something stupidly simple, but the person before me quit about a month before I got hired and this process is different from what I am use to.

Tell us about your test machine.

You have an older version of Ghost which does not provide WinPE as a boot environment, but this is increasingly required in order to support modern hardware.

PCDOS does not natively support SATA, yet systems now ship with SATA hard disks as standard, and increasingly feature SATA optical devices as well, which are much harder to boot under PCDOS than the older IDE technology.  Consequently you may wish to look at the current V11.5.1.2266 release.

Unfortunately, I do not know the V11.0 product's boot disk generation process well enough to be able to spot what you might be doing wrong, but as you have spotted a difference between your boot CD and your predecessors, something is clearly missing from your process. 

The following excerpt from a previous thread may help:

In a CD boot, the CD is marked as containing either a floppy or hard disc boot image; it's the job of the host BIOS to use this to then install a suitable emulator for a drive into the BIOS list of available drives (using the INT 13h BIOS API for floppy and hard disk access).

In times of yore, it was extremely common for these emulators to be buggy; so, often a CD could boot on one system with floppy emulation, but the hard disk emulation was incomplete or overwrote CPU emulation, whereas on another system the hard disk emulation would work but the floppy emulation was limited. Either way, whatever emulation was built into the machine's  system BIOS was what you got.

So if you are experimenting with building boot images, it may pay you to start simple and remove any functionality that is not immediately necessary, such as USB and FireWire emulation, and work with USB sticks, as there is no media cost for failure. PCDOS has limited base memory in which to load various drivers, so the less you load, the less likely you are to run out of base memory.

 then I am prompted to make floppy disk, create an ISO, or load to USB drive.

There's an option missing there; at that point in the Boot Wizard, there are more options present and one of then should be "CD/DVD Rom". That's the option which lets you burn a bootable optical disk directly, and it's the one you want.

If I select ISO, 

Well, that's your problem. An "ISO" is - other than the name of the International Standards Organization, whose ISO 9660 standard defined how optical disks are laid out - a common shorthand for a file format which represents an *optical disk image* in a file.

The content of the .ISO file is a direct binary image of the data on an optical disk, still in its original (ISO 9660) layout and set up to be burned back disk, by a specialized CD/DVD burning program like ImgBurn/Nero/etc, or can be mounted in a virtual machine to emulate a physical CD/DVD drive.

Basically, you should select ISO only if you don't want to burn the disk directly in the Boot Wizard.

If I select ISO, there is an option to add support for a bootable CD/DVD. I have tried this option both checked and unchecked.

That option doesn't have anything to do with the bootability of the disk you make in GBW; it's an advanced option in the disk you build, where Ghost can create an image onto CD/DVD directly and make it bootable (and puts a copy of itself on the disk it builds so it can restore the image).

On the disk that I have made there is just the ISO that I have created.

What you describe is that instead of burning a boot CD is that you instead got GBW to write an ISO image of the boot CD; and worse, you wrote that ISO file to the CD by using the CD as a mounted drive (using one of the many tools for Windows that uses the UDF filesystem format to make a CD or DVD appear to be a normal writeable disk, by burning the disk incrementally).

Since in this case the CD/DVD wasn't blank, but already formatted with the UDF filesystem, it's not going to be bootable no matter what. To make a CD bootable, the first sectors of the disk need special formatting, and this means either writing direct to the CD from the Boot Wizard using the "CD/DVD ROM" target instead of ISO (or USB, or Floppy) or writing an ISO and using a separate CD/DVD burning program to write the content of that ISO to a disk.

Nigel, I think you are the closest out of the two responses. I understand what an ISO is and why this itself is not a bootable image. What I do not understand is what I am doing wrong. In my GBW there is now option for "CD/DVD Rom". To my knowledge this has never been an option for our system, but as I said previously, the person normally responsible for this left the company a month before I started. The version of GBW that I used previously did have the option for "CD/DVD Rom" and I had no issues. I think in the mean time I will just use imgBurn to make the disks bootable and leave it at that. Maybe once the review process comes up I can make a push to move to a WinPE friendly environment.