Ghost Solution Suite

Hi all...

I'm a Ghost 10 user -- specifically somebody that boots from the Ghost 10 CD to access Ghost Corporate 8.2 to make images of my XP hard disk on external drive. This works great as I don't actually have to install Ghost to make/restore the image.

But with Vista, I apparently need to get to *8.3* to make this work? (8.2 complains about open files that can't be locked when I try to make an image from this boot CD...)

Does the GSS 2.0 package come with a similar "recovery/boot" CD that does the same thing, but get me to Ghost 8.3 to make Vista images to my external drive?

I'm not finding that in the product description anywhere (unless I'm just missing it...)

Thanks much!

- Steve

> But with Vista, I apparently need to get to *8.3* to make this work?

The main issue with cloning Vista that I know of is that the boot.ini has been replaced with a mini-registry called the Boot Configuration Data, and Vista does not handle changes in the Disk Signature in the Master Boot Record very gracefully because the BCD data refers to the signatures.

That tends to mean that with versions up to and including 8.3 you clone Vista with the "-fdsp" switch, and/or use a Microsoft utility called "bcdedit" to adjust the Boot Configuration Data file.

Version 8.3 of Ghost - the real Ghost cloning client - is the version in Ghost Solution Suite 1.1. With Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 we wanted to increment the major version number but because the consumer product had jumped into our version sequence instead of being numbered by year as all other consumer products are, we had to jump from 8.3 to 11.0 to resolve the confusion.

So, the most recent version of the classic Ghost cloning client is 11.0.0.1502 and it handles fixing up the Vista Boot Configuration Data automatically.

> 8.2 complains about open files that can't be locked when I try to make an image from this boot CD...

Ghost needs to get exclusive access to the hard disk, and that's not something that has changed from 8.2 to 11.0. I'm a little bit stumped as to why the "Ghost 10" version of Windows PE would not let us get an exclusive lock on the Vista hard disk volume. Presumably some process is holding one of the hard-disk files open, but you'll need to use a tool like Process Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx which can allow you to search for open files to see what other program is blocking Ghost by holding files on the hard disk open.

Since the conflict is being caused by some code other than Ghost refusing to let Ghost get access to the disk, it's hard to say that the later version will necessarily work. The best thing to do is to work what program is blocking it (and why).

> Does the GSS 2.0 package come with a similar "recovery/boot" CD that does the same thing, but get me to Ghost 8.3 to make Vista images to my external drive?

It does, but it's quite different from the Windows-based boot CD you get with "Ghost 10". GSS has for several releases built boot CDs based on PC-DOS (or MS-DOS if the customer supplies it, since we can't include it).

We don't include Windows PE with GSS for several reasons. One is licensing costs - since GSS is licensed per client, we'd need to include a a license for Windows PE with every Ghost client license. Another is that GSS customers often need to include specialized network or storage driver sets beyond the normal Windows PE ones, and so it's hard to know how many customers would really benefit from having a Windows PE boot CD in the box.

You can easily build your own Windows-based recovery CD using PEBuilder - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - if the DOS-based ones we build in GSS2 don't suit you.

So, "Process Explorer" might tell me why Ghost 8.2 isn't able to "lock" everything?

This would mean that it's probably the Windows PE environment that's on the Ghost 10 CD that's doing this, right, and I'd have to customize a PE environment to (somehow) figure this out.

If I'm booting from the Ghost 10 CD, there really can't be anything specifically open on the Vista HD that would keep things from being "locked", would there?


Thanks for the details on what GSS has. Might my needs (the ability to boot from CD to copy an internal HD image to external HD) be solved by what I'd be assuming would be "Ghost 11 Home"? Any idea when that might ship if that's the case? GSS sounds a bit like overkill for what I need here.

> So, "Process Explorer" might tell me why Ghost 8.2 isn't able to "lock" everything?

Yup. It's useful for things like this when, for example, you try to dismount a USB device and you get told it's "busy", which is exactly the same thing as the error you were getting from Ghost. Process Explorer can find the name of the underlying file for every open file handle in every process, and Control-F lets you do a substring search over all of them.

So, if I had a USB device I couldn't remove safely on drive F:, I could do a find in Process Explorer for the string "F:\" and see a) what process had a file open, and b) what file is open, and from that how to get a clean shutdown. The same applies for Ghost, since it needs to dismount the hard disk volume to clone it but something is blocking that.

> If I'm booting from the Ghost 10 CD, there really can't be anything specifically open on the Vista HD that would keep things from being "locked", would there?

I wouldn't think so, but it's hard to think of any other reason why you'd get that error message - all Ghost is doing is using a documented API to ask for the Vista volume to be dismounted, and Windows PE is refusing. Since the refusal doesn't explain why it wouldn't let it be dismounted, we're left to guess - Process Explorer is about the only tool I know of that can give us any real information as to the underlying cause.

> "Ghost 11 Home"?

I actually have no idea what the consumer division is planning - Norton Save and Restore is the successor product to "Ghost 10", but that's all I know. I don't believe NS&R includes any version of classic Ghost at all (although I'm happy to be corrected) - the classic Ghost cloning client that our team makes was only included in "Ghost 9" and 10 in order to provide support for Windows 9x and NT4.

> Any idea when that might ship if that's the case?

None, although I'd assume that being a consumer product they are planning around the consumer launch date for Vista. Since the underlying cloning engine is a variant of the one in Backup Exec System Recovery, it'll be able to pick up the Vista support from that.