Ghost Solution Suite

I am tasked with creating a boot-media DVD that will do the following:

Boot ghost and restore an image on the DVD to the computer booting the DVD.

Pretty simple, eh?  Oh, were it only so...

I started using Ghost32, creating a DVD in the SGSS Boot Wizard and adding the image file in the wizard... I tried that several times and after the 3rd of 4th "Bad block found" while restoring the known-good image (I tried several) I decided to focus on 16 bit Ghost (note that I have no problem restoring this image using Ghost32 if the image is stored anywhere but the booted DVD).

I am creating a boot VFD (Virtual Floppy Disk) based on a disk we use with PowerQuest - I merely replace batch references to PowerQuest with Ghost.exe. My initial attempts have been to get ghost to boot manually and through the UI select the image and start the imaging process (My thinking here is that I would avoid any potential scripting errors this way).

Immediately, Ghost started throughing "Stack Overflow" errors.  I revised my Config.sys to include a stacks statement STACKS = 32,512 (PC-DOS max)...  Booting this eliminates the stack overflow, but the image process is PAINFULLY slow... Over an hour to lay down a 1.9GB image.

I've tried fine-tuning my stacks/buffers/files statements, but any variation from the above stacks settings causes Ghost to ether fail with a stack overflow or freeze up after about 2 minutes.

Any suggestions to speed this up??

thanks!

DOS has had its day and no longer has the ability to fully support modern hardware. You also have a limit on the amount of memory DOS can handle, and allocating stack space eats into the available RAM so further slowing down the imaging process as it has to happen in smaller "chunks".

So you should seriously consider moving up to WinPE. This has support for modern hardware and modern drivers and is not limited to base memory of 640 K.  Ghost 11.5.1 has everything you need to move to WinPE so why not give it a try?

Well, as you may have read in the first bit of my post, I *have* tried using the WinPE builder that SGSS comes with... I have not attempted to build a WinPE DVD on my own to this point, but that may be something in the future.

HOWEVER: DOS works just fine if I have a DOS CD runnign Ghost with my image file located elsewhere; DOS is "fully supported" by SGSS  - so it *should* work, weather it's obsolete or not.

DOS -is- fully supported, and if you consider that you do actually have a working implementation then we are done here.

However, you remark on how painfully slow the DOS process is, and that is purely down to its inherent limitations. The more base memory you use for things like stack space, the less memory you have available for imaging.  There are some memory management options available through use of HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE but I'm going to assume all this is already in place.  PCDOS has no support for SATA devices, so you have to set compatibility mode in the system bios to get anywhere with what is now standard hardware in modern machines.

So the bottom line is that there are few if any options available to fine tune PCDOS here.

Is your boot VFD indicative of a VMWare environment being used for imaging?