Ghost Solution Suite

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  • 1.  GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 11:14 AM

    Received an email from Dell that they are transitioning their hard drives to 4K sector models for their new systems.This is happening on some of their systems now, and more starting May.

    Does ghost SS support these 4K sector hard drives? Is there any thing we need to do?



  • 2.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 11:24 AM

    More info about this can be found here:

    http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?docid=409842

     

    It looks like windows PE 1.0 & 2.0 are not Advance Format Aware. (3.0 is)

    GSS uses Windows PE 2.0. so I do not think it will work on these new drives

     

    Symantec are you working on a fix?

    Dell sugguestion is to use a Use an Alignment Tool to ensure Advanced Format drive partitions are properly aligned.



  • 3.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 12:55 PM

    We also recieved the email from Dell.  Has anyone seen where Symantec has addressed this new Advanced Format for the new industry hard drive standard?



  • 4.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 02:29 PM

    I do not believe there is anything under way at Symantec regarding 4K sectoring as the engineer(s) working on Ghost 3 were laid off last year.

    Western Digital's 2Tb drives have been 4K sector for a while now, but since the hardware interface remains SATA, I believe the only issues will be around partitioning, but I will check.



  • 5.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 03:17 PM

    I'm awaiting a call back from Symantec now.  Stand by for news!!



  • 6.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 04:40 PM


  • 7.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 06:57 PM

    Extremely old versions of ghost work on SSD drives which have a 1024 sector alignment. The trick is to both create and restore using Partition instead of Disk images. In this way, ghost is just writing out files. Of course, in a commercial situation you're probably wanting to lay down images on drives that are bare and what not, and want to create partitions all in one go. Let us know how it goes with that command line switch.

    One thing about booting from WinPE, you'd be better served using Win7PE_SE which also has a x64 bit version should you need support for drives over 4TB. That to me will be the real kicker with ghost ... can it create a partition for 4TB or more? There is a ghost64.exe included in the latest version of ghost so I'm hoping so. Using Win7PE_SE (windows 7) also allows for better driver support out of the box, I've been using it and it works fine.

    I can't believe Symantec would stop development of this great product ... hmm. I hope they pick it up again. The thing is that with everyone moving to booting from a real OS, all we need is a file packer/writer, which is what ghost is. The question is can it also do partition work, and if not, can we just automate windows to do that then fire off ghost32/64 to lay down the files? I thinking we can.



  • 8.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 27, 2011 07:06 PM

    Actually we knew all about this - it's not like this move was unanticipated, by us or Microsoft - and the reason we never said much about it is that just as with SSDs, pretty much nothing stops working and there's nothing anyone actually really needs to do.

    Support for this was put in place with Vista; it's that OS which broke with the long-established convention in PC operating systems that filesystem partitions should be cylinder-aligned, and by default uses partition table layouts where partitions are aligned on 1Mb boundaries. The system wasn't aware of the sector size of the drives in question, Microsoft just unilaterally changed the rules for partition layout, and much of the work done in Ghost itself for GSS 2.0 involved honouring that layout set by the OS in the source image (that and finding and removing all the places where over the years, cylinder-alignment was an unwritten assumption in the code so that things broke when processing non-cylinder-aligned data).

    Microsoft made this change precisely to anticipate the move to drives that are natively 4k-sector, and so from an engineering perspective once we'd adapted to it we were confident that we'd done everything necessary, and that once vendors actually produced these drives we were confident that was the case. During 2010 my colleage Robert Chester worked with 4k-sectors drives supplied to us as engineering samples from drive manufacturers (and with other drives to validate >2Tb capacities, incidentally) to validate Ghost's handling, and things worked precisely as we had expected.

    That alignment switch actually comes from the Vista work done in Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 and really it's there to override Ghost's natural behaviour if for some reason it was to make a mistake in detecting the particular partition alignment factor used in the source image (and lots of the Ghost switches are like that, they exist not to be be used routinely but rather as "in case our logic for detecting this behaviour for you turns out to be insufficient").

    The big thing is that 4k drives still work just fine in old systems; in fact, hard drive throughput improves generally so fast over the years that in most cases if you were replace a failed drive in an XP system with a 4k one and do absolutely nothing (leaving it misaligned) it'll not only work fine it'll almost certainly still be faster than the drive it replaced.

    Basically, these have actually already been in the market quite a decent while; Western Digital in particular were manufacturing 4k-sector drives for over a year and Toshiba were also doing so. If you're using Vista or Win7 there's almost certainly no need for any Ghost user to do anything, and you're still primarily using Windows XP then it's entirely up to you whether to bother or not.



  • 9.  RE: GHOST: Industry hard drive transition to 4K

    Posted Apr 28, 2011 07:44 PM

    Now why couldn't the tech I talked to just say that??  hahaha   Thanks for the info Nigel!