Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

I have 2 questions.

1. How do I define a clone task in Ghost Console ver 11.0.2.1573 that will successfully  execute on a "client" pc that is booted via PXE to a WinPE environment?
      A little information about the setup.  Ghost Console is standard type setup.  Client boots to WinPE via PXE from the said console.  WinPE is a WIM built with Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 GBW.  I have modified the WIM with client files from older console.  I remmed out the statement  "ghost32.exe /setosdrives /blind >> x:\ghost\startlog.txt" as the older version of ghost32 does not seem to know what to do with the switches.  I tried to let the start.bat command "start ngctw32.exe -console" do its magic but it would show up as a process for a few seconds and then disappear.  I have ran ngctw32.exe -install as that appears to be the only way to get the client to stay active. This allows for communications between the client and console. 

I start a task and the client starts to reply like it should, updates the x:\ghost directory with ghost.exe etc..  It then gets the command from the console to start ghost and connect  to the right session but ghost can not start.  the ngctw32.log file shows that it gets the command but that there is no response.  I do a dir on the ghost directory and the ghost.exe is there.  I attempt to execute ghost.exe from the command line and it returns that there is no ghost.exe.. I delete ghost.exe from directory and copy the ghost32.exe to ghost.exe and ghost can launch but still ngctw32 can not start it.  Is there someway to define a task that will acknowledge that the client is in a 32 bit PE environment and not in DOS?  I imagine if I could do that with the cloning part, I would have to do the same with the config part as well.

2. This question has to do with the above setup.  I am using the GBW from the Demo of GSS2.5 to build the above WinPE WIM.  Is this compatible and allowed under the Demo aggreement?  I don't want to do anything that would not be considered appropriate use so I will stop this if you say so and use some other WinPE development tools if I have to.  Regardless, Can I use WinPE as a "virtual boot partition" to boot bare metal machines, connect to a console and have clone tasks successfully run on them from a ver. 11.0.2.1573 console.

Thanks,

Important notes: if you do rem ghost32 /setosdrives then you are running real risk of cloning over something you do not want. Winpe will mount volumes not in always a stable order, which means that your d: drive under Windows could well be mounted as e: under Winpe and e: as d:. Setosdrives removes all mount points assigned by Winpe and sets them to same as it was under "real OS".

Secondly, you cannot fool client agent - it has built-in mechanism to update itself so even when you uncompress WIM and install old version. Old version will connect and download new version from Console, including tools to run.

ghost.exe can not run under Winpe - it is DOS version.

Generally we dont guarantee that older Console can work with newer clients - we guarantee the other way round. This means that newer Console can always upgrade older clients to latest version. I do not know whether it will work the other way.

You should be able to connect GSS 2.5 ghost32 to ghostcast session from 2.0 builds without any issues (eg. manually starting up GSS 2.5 ghost32 under Winpe and connecting to ghostcast session or with command-line params) but not thru the Console - there is no guarantee of that to work.

Thank you for the response,
I am still wondering if I build a WINPE preboot envirnonment, can I run clone tasks from ver 11.0.2.1573 of the console.  I think this is GSS 1.5.  The above scenario includes the pubkey from the 11.0.2.1573 console so theoretically I have older client talking to older console in a PE environment.  It looks like the client is getting instructions from the console but it is trying to launch ghost.exe not ghost32.exe.  The older Ghost32 actually does work fine in this scenario as I have connected to a ghostcast session no problem but again I want to control the scenario via the ghost console.

Concerning my second question, Is it a violation of the software agreement to use the demo of ver 2.5 for GBW to build PE boot environments for older versions of Ghost Console?

When I am trying to create a boot disk, I get a message from Microsfot Visual C++ runtime library:
Program: C:\program files\symantec\ghost\ghost boot wizard.exe
this application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
please contact the application support team for more information.


I dont know why I am getting this message- running windows xp pro sp3

thanks