Ghost Solution Suite

Is there any simple way to convert ghost image .gho to iso?

Thanks

If you mean to simply convert the content inside a .GHO to a ISO, that's not easily possible because the semantics of the two don't really line up very well. The ISO 9660 and UDF filesystems don't have many of the capabilities of NTFS/ext3/etc which .GHO images are designed to preserve, and therefore if you want to perform such a format conversion then it's up to you to work through those differences in capabilities to determine what you want to happen.

If you happen to mean put a .GHO in an ISO image along with Ghost, then there's a tool for that in Ghost Solution Suite, the Ghost Boot Wizard. In practice, the currently available versions of the GBW are limited, because of the extreme age and poor design of the optical disk code in it. The current editions of GBW contains a number of hard limits on the size of ISO 9660 filesystem it will build, along with limits on the types of media it supports; it's not possible to use the full capacity of even a dual-layer DVD, let alone a Blu-Ray drive.

In 2009 around the time Symantec shut down active development of Ghost, I had rewritten all the optical-disk code in the GBW to remove all the hard-coded limits and add full support for dual-layer DVD and all types of Blu-Ray media; however, that work was done in the Ghost Solution Suite 3.0 code line and was too complex to backport to GSS 2.5 because the optical disk code in GBW was shared with Ghost (let along the fact that we no longer had any staff or budget to effectively QA it).

Given the readily availability of third-party tools to work with ISO images and larger drive capacities, it's probably best to build a base ISO with the GBW and then use that as a template for mastering new ISOs which contain the desired image, given that dual-layer and Blu-Ray media are preferable for modern image sizes.

How do you want to use the ISO ?

Hi all!

Thanks for the response. Actually we have to install window 7 on specific computer for some testing purpose. We got window 7 image in .gho form. I just have to install that image to computer. We were using Ghost server before but now we dont have license for that and we moved to WDS but right now in short i just have to install that specific window 7 ghost image to one of the computer.

I dont want to go into this .gho. I just want to either convert it to .iso so that i can easily install it.

Thanks

An iso is not going to make it possible to install an image in any way I can imagine.

A ghost image is a recording of the contents of sectors on the hard disk plus additional information about the partition. As Nigel indicated, converting it to an ISO would not be straightforward and would not achieve your objective either, as it would not create an installable image in the way that a Windows 7 installation iso is written.

Depending on the version of Ghost used by the creator of your Win 7 image, it may not be a viable image either. Only the latest GSS version 11.5.1.2266 can image Win 7 successfully, and again, there are two partitions that need to be captured, not just one.

Don't waste your time. Get a normal Windows 7 installation disk and install that instead. You may have to gather some drivers (although Win 7 is pretty good at finding them using Windows update) but it's going to be a lot quicker than trying to use the Ghost image without a current Ghost environment.

Finally, if the image was created using Norton Ghost then this happens to be a different product to Ghost Solution Suite.

Depending on the version of Ghost used by the creator of your Win 7 image, it may not be a viable image either

That's actually not accurate; the changes for Windows 7 support were absolutely microscopic, and didn't involve the image format. There's nothing about Windows 7 that wasn't in Vista, in fact, it's just that the split-load method which Windows 7 installations tend to want to use do was not the install default for Vista (in Vista, splitloading was only really used for Bitlocker installations).

Basically, the work for this lives in the restore side, in the adjustments made to ensure that the system is still bootable; generating a new MBR disk signature if a disk restore is being performed and replacing the volume mounts stored in the restored system's registry to reflect this, along with BOOT.INI adjustments in versions of NT prior to Vista, or BCD edits for Vista/Win7 (along with the other bits and bobs Ghost has always done to adapt changes in volume size and disk geometry).

These restore-side processes need to do a lot of work to probe what kind of system the target is, and in the case of split-load Win7 installs there's just a few changes to the process to make it fire-and-forget (you actually could do split-load restores manually with the earlier GSS 2.x versions but there's a quite specific process that you'd have to follow, as with Bitlocker deployments).

Depending on the exact nature of the relationship between you and the person or organization you are doing this testing for, they may well be able to assist you; the organization you are assisting can employ VAR licenses for Ghost; these are used by computer manufacturers to deploy machines and also allows them to build recovery images and bundle a restore-only version of the Ghost cloning executable which allows that image to be redeployed to the same hardware. Since VAR licenses explicitly are designed for resellers, they don't have the same prohibition on sublicensing that the normal licenses do.

[ I'd note, by the way, that although sublicensing has been explicitly forbidden by the normal EULA, in practice it's something that is not uncommon; companies that perform outsource IT services sometimes purchase tools like Ghost Solution Suite on their own account, to be used on the machines owned by (thus, in effect on behalf of) the companies they are contracted with. In essence, as long as all the client machines which Ghost is used with can be traced to a license, it's mostly a case of "no harm, no foul"; Symantec's main interest in sublicensing derives from it being used to aggregate purchases to achieve bigger volume discounts. But as Symantec isn't being denied the license revenue it's due if things were done strictly by the book, no-one really cares. ]

Depending on the identity of the organization you are working with, they may already use VAR licenses but if not they are extremely inexpensive.

We were using Ghost server before but now we dont have license for that

Just to be clear, Ghost is not and has never been licensed on the basis of servers; Ghost instead is licensed on the basis of clients to which an image is deployed/from which one is taken. If you have a client license for some particular version of Ghost, then any and all of the tools in the edition of the suite being licensed - including the various server components as well as boot disks and what have you - can be employed with that client machine. Essentially, everything in the suite is an adjunct to the client license; even if it's not code that is run on the client, it exists to aid the client deployment.

For a machine to have a .GHO deployed to it, via any method, that machine must have a suitable client license and that license stays attached to that machine until it is (in the specific term used in the EULA) "put beyond use", which in practice means that the deployed image is erased from the machine via some method such as a disk wipe (at which point the license can be reassigned to a different piece of client hardware).

The license that is attached to a client to permit use of Ghost with it is perpetual and does not expire, until it is removed as I describe above.

Nigel, the version of Ghost used to create the image is unknown, and I recall a recent posting of yours (https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/ghosting-error-windows-7) which stated that earlier versions did not handle BCD edits. It would be nice to assume that the providers of the Ghost image used a version that could handle BCD edits, but experience has shown that it is dangerous to assume anything.

Sure, but the BCD edits (and disk signature changes, etc) are all handled on the restore side - they have to be. It matters a lot which version you restore with, vastly less what version you capture with. The majority of the changes to Ghost tend to affect the restore side, in fact, because its methodology for capturing images is so simple - almost everything clever anyone needs it to do is on the restore side.

Basically, what you wrote clearly implied that if the image was captured with an old version it won't be deployable, but it's the version you use at deployment time that matters. Plus, there's also the option of using disk signature preservation - while that's not a good idea in deployment scenarios, for a one-shot deal like this it's not likely to be a big deal getting the image restored in older versions.

That is something I did not realise - thank you for filling that hole in my knowledge...