Ghost Solution Suite

I have run the DOS version of Ghost 11 from a CD created with Ghost using Windows 98 boot media.

 

It took 13 hours to complete a high compression ghost image of the system drive on to a 400GB SATA drive. The thing is the image does not appear to be on the drive though the space has been used up.

 

Please look at the screen below, you can see that only 89GB is free out of the 372GB available but when opening the drive the .gho file is nowhere to be seen. Where is my image?

 

 

Have you tried turning off "helpful" Vista folder options - like "dont show all files" and "dont show system files" etc? Also since you are running on Vista you might not have rights to see files created by anybody else (ghostcast server running in either system or admin account) but yourself. You can always start Explorer as Administrator thou. Otherwise startup cmd.exe as an Administrator, go to the folder where you put an image and am sure you'll find it there :)

Vista makes lots of people happy :)

Cheers.

All files including system files are shown, still nothing. I've plugged this drive into an XP computer and the same thing happens. Nothing there, not even under DOS. Utter weirdness!

You can try using onmifs32.exe (from ghost folder) on this volume. It supports certain cmd prompt like commands "dir 1.3:\mytest.gho" - this might shed some light. Do gdisk32.exe first to find out what your f: correponds to.

I have the same problem.  I have been using a removable drive to store our images on for many months.  The primary partition has the system boot and ghost 8.3 executable files on it and is FAT32.  The second partition is NTFS and is used purely for storing images.  I experienced this problem for the first time last week.  My newly created image was viewable during the same Ghost session, but 'disappeared' as soon as I exit.  The image files are not visible in Windows XP either, but Windows shows a corresponding amount of drive space being used.  If I write to an existing image, it is okay; but new image files don't show up.

 

I did a defrag on that partition just for fun.  It did not clear up the problem, but it did explicitly name my image file as not being defragmentable in the defrag report.  Then I reformatted (not quick option) the partition NTFS with default allocation unit size; that did not work either.  A newly created image again did not show, but the space is being used.  I did another defrag immediately after creating the image file and it shows one of the GHS (not the GHO) files as being fragmented, but as before, it cannot defrag it.  So, I am leaning towards some kind of disk or file system problem.  The next thing I am going to do is format the partition FAT32 just for grins.  If problem still exists, I will then reformat the entire drive and see how it goes.

 

If anyone has any ideas, feel free to submit.  Thanks.

The solution is simple! When Ghost starts and asks you: "New hard drive has been detected......Mark these drives as usable in Ghost?" then you should click "OK". After that, everything works fine again and your new images stop disappearing into thin air. By the way, you need to mark only the drive that you use as an image storage, destination drive marking is not crucial. So, if you have once marked the image storage drive as usable in ghost, then you can click "continue without marking" for the rest of the time.

 

I am having the exact same problem using Ghost 8.3 and saving images to an external RAID via a LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2.  Unfortunately, this is an official process and I need to figure out the issue ASAP.

 

This is the only thread on the internet that has any info on the issue, and there's no solution?  Has anyone made any progress with this problem.  Saw this a year or two back, but there wasn't even this thread then and the problem went away on it's own.

 

Server 2003 OS.  Same issue, log in to windows and the space is gone, but the file doesn't show?  Something with the master file list for the partition?

 

Please help... I'm against the wall on this one.

Has anybody tried using omnifs tool from standard GSS suite as I have suggested awhile back?

Does this drive of yours have any disk of volume protection or encryption software on it?

 

There is no such thing as "master file list" on any given volume. Depending on the filesystem on the volume files and folder lists will be stored differently but this should not prevent OS from seeing them unless there is 3rd party software that doing it.

 

Also can you please run gdisk32 on this disk with following commands (where xD is your disk number):

 

gdisk32 xD /lba

gdisk32 xD /raw

gdisk32 xD /view:0

 

and post results here.

 

Thanks.

First, thank you for the prompt response.

 

I am a little confused as to what I was supposed to do with Omnifs32, but I did what I could.  Running the dir command, it can NOT see the missing file.

 

gdisk32 /lba output:

Disk: 2

Port: 1

Cylinders: 35057

Heads: 255

Sectors: 63

Megabytes: 274998.0

Sectors: 563195904

ID: 00

Parent: --

Slot: 0

System: 07

Type: Primary

Start: 63

End: 563190704

Offset: 63

Secotrs: 563190642

 

gdisk32 /raw output:

 

Disk, Part, Cylinders, Heads, Sectors same as above...

Megabytes: 274988.0

Sectors: 563195904

ID:

Parent:

Slot: 0

System: 07

Type: Primary

Start: 0/1/1

Ends: 1023/254/63*

Offset: 63

Sectors: 563190642

 

gdisk32 /view:0  output:

 

Disk, Port, Cyclinders, Heads, Sectors, Megabytes   all same as above...

Model: MegaRAID LV 0 MegaRAID

Part: D:1

Status:

Type: Primary

Volume Label:

Megabytes: 274995.4

System: NTFS/HPFS

Usage: 99%

 

 

Please let me know what else I can do.

When running omnifs you need something like: omnifs32 dir d:\myimage.gho.

 

When running gdisk32 I asked to specify disk number please:

 

gdisk32 <disknumber> /raw

 

and so on.

When I ran the omnifs32 command, I did use the 'dir' switch.  I ran omnifs32 dir d:\bs1.gho.  Bs1.gho was the name of the file that I made, but disappeared.  All the program said was it couldn't find a file with that name.  When I ran a 'dir' switch on the d:\ without the file specified, it listed the contents of the dir, but the 'invisible' file was still not there.  Did I do that incorrectly?

 

Secondly, I ran gdisk32 with the disknumber switch.  The info displayed is for disk 2 in my system, which corresponds to the d:\ drive, which is where the file that disappeared was/is stored.

 

So, what's next?

If you type omnifs32 dir d:\bs1.gho it will use native filesystem access, which we know arent working. Can you try omnifs32 dir 2:1\bs1.gho. Disk 2 partition 1. This will force omnifs to use proprietary filesystem access, ie. ghost own filesystem knowledge. If this works you can then use omnifs32 copy 2:1\bs1.gho c:\.

Still interesting why this is happening? You dont have any compression or encryption software?

I will give that a shot.  In the meantime, it appears that on at least one system the cause is improperly exiting the ghost application.  We are ghosting the system using a ghost boot floppy, and the tech was restarting the machine after creating and verifying the image file without actually "quiting" the application.  On one system, this appears to be directly related to the file disappearing.

 

As far as compression or encryption, we use no encryption software, and the only compression is done by the ghost application.  They select "Fast" compression by default.

 

I'll post what we get from running omnifs32 with the drive number path.

I have the same problem. A 50 gig file disappear form my HD but all the space is occupied.

Have you find any solution to this yet.  Here are my outputs.

 

D:\Ghost>gdisk32 1 /raw
GDISK32 (W) Fixed disk 1 has partition(s) that extend past the end of the disk

Disk  Partitions  Cylinders  Heads  Sectors  Mbytes  Sectors    Format
  1        2        12161     255      63   95396.3  195371568     MBR

ID Parent Slot Sys   Type         Starts         Ends      Offset   Sectors
00   --     0   07  PRIMARY        0/1/1   1023/254/63*        63  61432497
01   --     1   07  PRIMARY   1023/254/63* 1023/254/63*  61433856 133948674

D:\Ghost>gdisk32 2 /raw
GDISK32 (W) Fixed disk 1 has partition(s) that extend past the end of the disk
GDISK32 (E) No such fixed disk -- 2

D:\Ghost>omnifs32 dir 1:2\*.gho
No volume could be mounted using 1:2\*.gho

Sorry my typo; command should look like:

omnifs32 dir 1.2:\*.gho or

omnifs32 dir 1.2:\

 

No, this is the first rport of this issue and even then, as you can see, it appears to be due to improper exit from ghost rather than anythig else, even thou this sounds strange...

 

Same problem - I created a 100GB ghost file using Symantec Ghost 8.3 of a XP system.  Windows showed the space to be allocated, but I could not find the file.  I tried some of the above suggestions, all of which failed to help uncover the file.  I was not able to find the omnifs tool discussed (although I perhaps didn't spend enough time searching).

 

Solution: When running Ontrack's EasyRecovery Professional 6.03, I chose the "recover from format option".  This uncovered the .gho file!  The file was listed as "cross-linked" (?), although I'm not too concerned about that anymore.  You can obtain the "lite" version of this software from CNET. This demo version only allows recovery of 25 files, but you only need 1!

Hi, 

in fact it is quite simple : 

you have to put your HD in an external case and to plug it on a windows XP computer (it does not work on VISTA).
Then use Ontrack Recovery Pro from this XP PC to recover the lost files and save them onto another HD.
Once all the files recovered, copy all the other files from the parttion to another partition or drive. Then format the partition and copy back all the files to it.

To avoid to have to remove the drive from a laptop take another external drive and plug it to the laptop. Then copy drive to drive (ghost option) to clone the drive : then your back to the first step above with the cloned drive. 

Concerning the root cause that is suppose to be the way you quit the application I suggest that you verify you image file with ghost before quitting properly the application using the menu, the verification is much quicker than the image generation itself and it is the guaranty that the backup actually worked properly.

Regards

Nick93

Hi, 

in fact it is quite simple : 

you have to put your HD in an external case and to plug it on a windows XP computer (it does not work on VISTA).
Then use Ontrack Recovery Pro from this XP PC to recover the lost files and save them onto another HD.
Once all the files recovered, copy all the other files from the parttion to another partition or drive. Then format the partition and copy back all the files to it.

To avoid to have to remove the drive from a laptop take another external drive and plug it to the laptop. Then copy drive to drive (ghost option) to clone the drive : then your back to the first step above with the cloned drive. 

Concerning the root cause that is suppose to be the way you quit the application I suggest that you verify you image file with ghost before quitting properly the application using the menu, the verification is much quicker than the image generation itself and it is the guaranty that the backup actually worked properly.

Regards

Nick93