Ghost Solution Suite

We recently upgrade our console to GSS 2.0 and some image pushes are failing with the following error message.
"Error finding Windows installation location".  The task is successful at creating the account, preparing the config, cloning and SID change.  When it gets the configuration stage, the PC reboots and goes back to the Ghost partition/polling screen.  Ghost pushes the image to the PC, but it's nowhere to be found.  I ran Gdisk and all that is on the disk is the boot partition.

This particular image has worked fine on previous versions of Ghost.  The image consists of a Dell utility partition and the Windows partition.  I believe Ghost is getting confused and looking for Windows on the first partition, where the Dell utility partition exists.  Is there a fix for this?  Can we maintain the 2 partition image and continue to use Ghost to deploy?

Hi,

we need more information to be able to diagnose your problem. Can you please tell us what type is the diagnostic partition (you can see that in Ghost Explorer or when you run Ghost and choose to restore a partition from image)? What is the operating system in your image and what filesystem does it contain?

What do you mean by:

---

all that is on the disk is the boot partition.

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? Do you mean the Virtual Partition (GHOSTBOOT) or the diagnostic partition?

If your computer is still in DOS and polling for server, you can stop it by pressing Ctrl+X and then try running "ghconfig.exe windows". What is the result of that command?

The change that is causing this problem in GSS2.0 is most probably the fact that the configuration changes are now applied in DOS before rebooting back into Windows.

Hopefully we can solve your problem
Aggie

Message Edited by Aggie Sosna on 04-17-200709:57 PM

Here is the additional information you requested.
 - the type of the Dell Diagnostic partition is Primary
 - the OS in the image is Windows XP SP2
 - the OS filesystem is NTFS
 - when I referred to boot partition, I was referring to GHOSTBOOT

Taking your advice, I pressed Ctrl-X to break out of the polling screen.

First I typed Gdisk 1 and was given this list

Partition 1   Active   Primary   -GHOSTBOOT-   FAT12
Partition 2   Hidden  Primary    DellUtility             Diagnostic
Partition 3                Primary                                NTFS/HPFS

Then I typed  ghconfig windows and this was the result

1.3:\Windows "Microsoft Windows XP Pro" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
1.3:\Windows default
Type ghreboot to attempt to return to Windows.

I typed ghreboot and the PC rebooted.  I was then brought to Windows XP, but the PC hasn't been renamed or joined to our domain.

I noticed after ghostwalker finishes running, there is some configuration commands displayed on the screen.  They go by fast, so it's difficult to read.  I did see an error message was being written to a file called ghconfer.txt.  I opened this file and found this txt, "Error finding Windows installation location".

Any idea why the ghost console isn't able to configure our PCs and join them to the domain?
   

I think we might be having a problem figuring out which is the default Windows installation - would you mind posting the contents of your boot.ini here? It is a hidden file located in the root of your system drive.
You could try adding a default entry to your boot.ini to see if it helps. Here's a copy of my boot.ini, the line in bold is what I think might be missing from yours and causing the confusion:
Code:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

This article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022 might also be of help.
Thanks
Aggie

Interrupting the DOS client with Ctrl+X then running "ghconfig.exe windows", gives:

2.1:\WINDOWS "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
2.1:\WINDOWS default

boot.ini, is as follows:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"  /fastdetect /noexecute=optin

Using gdisk, it shows Disk 1 Partition 1 as my boot pen and Disk 2 Partition 1 as my active system partition on the hard drive, so ghconfig.exe looks
as if it is finding the correct information ok.

Dave