Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

I am an intern working at a company and I am trying to figure out how to create an image, using Ghost, of a server with RAID 1 disks. I need to be able to create this image with RAID enabled and the RAID volume built but I cannot see the volume when RAID is enabled. How can I do this and specifically what drivers are needed to accomplish this.

My end goal is to be able to image a server and not have to rebuild or go through migration to copy contents of one disk to the other.

I assume your boot environment is WinPE.  You are going to need WinPE 3 at least, (Ghost comes with WinPE V2) so this article may be your starting point:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-and-using-winpe31-image-gss-251

The reason for needing a newer version of WinPE is that servers do not traditionally offer Vista 32 bit drivers (needed by WinPE2) but normally the servers will have drivers for server 2008 which should work OK with WinPE V3.

You are going to need to add the RAID drivers to WinPE plus any other associated hard disk chipset drivers in order to be able to access the hard disks.  WinPE allows driver to be loaded from the command line - the following article describes the process using DRVLOAD:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/do-i-have-correct-driver-winpe

Note that you can use either 32 bit or 64 bit WinPE as long as you use the appropriate 32 bit or 64 bit device drivers. Either will access the hard disk subsystem.  32 bit is normally adequate.

If you want to transfer the image to a network source you will also need to load a NIC driver, otherwise you can store to a local USB drive on a USB-2 port. If you have USB-3 ports, you will need to load an appropriate USB-3 driver as well.

Hi EdT,

At the time of my original post I could not see or access the Hard drives but I loaded some drivers and I am able to see them now. However, when I try to create an image of the OS volume (RAID 1, RAID enabled in BIOS) it gives a message similar to this: "symantec ghost needs to create a new image span...". 

I just want to be able to create one image file. I was using an 8 Gb USB and I was getting this message. I tried using a 128 GB but it still complains so I am stuck.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Wajih

USB sticks are normally formatted as FAT32 so the largest file you can create is a 2Gb file. After that Ghost will need to create a new span file.

You can format USB sticks as NTFS, (search Google) but bear in mind that NTFS is a journalling file system so leaving a USB stick plugged in will eventually use up the read/write cycles available on a flash device.

Or you could just use a plug in hard disk - also a lot faster than flash sticks.

Just a further thought - there is a command line switch for Ghost which also controls the size of span files so if you are using Ghost from the command line, and you want a single large image file, just add the appropriate switch (which I cannot recall at this moment but is in the documentation.)

Hi EdT,

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my original post. I used an 8Gb Flash drive that was formatted as NTFS and I formatted it using the Ghost Boot Wizard. Similarly I tried a 128 Gb Samsung SSD and connected it as a USB (formatted with Ghost Boot Wizard). I am currently using a trial version of the suite. Our USB configured with the trialware ghost can see the RAID volume since we applied the drivers through the boot wizard. 

Previously I was using an older version of ghost which is licensed. It has worked for us in the past in imaging servers and creating images without RAID enabled. However, since we didn't know how to load the necessary drivers into the USB, with the older version, we tried the trialware since it came with a boot wizard. However, the trialware complains with the span error message as I mentioned before. Even with no RAID enabled the newer trialware version is unable to create an image while our older version of ghost, with no drivers to detect RAID volume, is able to. Are the drivers possibly causing an issue?

I found a command line switch but I can't seem to find out how to use it through a google search or in the documentation. Maybe I am missing it but could you give me an example of how to use this switch: "/MFS=".

Currently if I type in the switch in the command line, booting from USB, it tells me the command is not recognized as an internal or external command. 

For the sake of clarity I attached the message I get when I try creating an image, with AHCI or RAID enabled, with the newer trialware version of Ghost.

Thanks, 

Wajih

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH130961&locale=en_US

This has a list of ghost switches.  The one you want is the -SPLIT=0 setting if I recall correctly.  If your version of Ghost has a ghost.ini file, look for the SPAN setting and change it from Y to N.

You destination to store image was X:\test.gho.  It was ram drive to load windows pe and ghost executables. It must change to other place.  

Span setting parameter like -split=2048 makes 2048mb files. That works.  

/MFS= is for Deploy Toolkit not for Ghost. 

Thank you,

Melina