Ghost Solution Suite

We started receiving HP Elite 8200 Desktops on campus, and they are coming with the new Sandy Bridge chipsets.  These are coming with UEFI instead of traditional BIOS.  When I use the Ghost console to restore the machine with our current image (Windows 7), it sits on "Starting Windows" forever.

Our current image is made on a machine that has a traditional BIOS (Lenovo m58p) and has only 1 partition, and we do a direct drive to image to make the .gho file.  When I install Windows 7 by hand with the DVD, it creates 3 partitions.  A 200MB EFI partition, and 128MB Microsoft System Recovery (MSR) partition, and a third partition that is the remaining space.

I am trying to maintain only 1 image that will work on UEFI and BIOS based computers, but the partitioning, according to Microsoft, is required for the UEFI one.  So for this, a couple questions

1) How do I make the Virtual Partition that the console uses work in this case?

2) How do I make the Ghost Boot Wizard Console partition work in this case?  It seems to wipe the whole machine and takes out the EFI and MSR partitions.

3) Can i use the same image on both types of machines, and maybe just Ghost the UEFI ones to partition 3 with a different task?  Or would I need 2 images, my normal one and one with the 3 partitions in it?

Some background info, since I know people will ask.  GSS 2.5.1 build 2269

My information is that support for UEFI, GPT and disks >2Tb has been in the Ghost code since the early 2000's based on prototype systems loaned by Intel, but there was never a real opportunity to test the code on production systems as there were none around at the time that the dev team were disbanded.

Have you tried imaging via PXE booting? This may be a simple way to check whether partition imaging (rather than drive imaging) is going to work for you.

I guess I will kind of treat this as a status update, in case anyone can use this.

We found that Win7 x64 kept giving us the "cannot install to GPT disk" errors no matter what we did.  So we just made the EFI partition a "primary" partition instead of "EFI" type.  This would cause the drive not to get flagged as GPT.  Because of this, we did not NEED the MSR partition.  We then used Ghost to insert the regular BIOS comp based image into partition 2.  This worked for the restore, and the machine booted.  We then backed up the hard disk (to get both partitions) and installed it back on the machine.  It worked!  We also installed it to a non-EFI machine, and it just ignores the EFI(Primary) partition and boots windows.

Next, we went into the Ghost Console and initiated a restore over the machine with the console partition, pushing the 2 partition image over it.  This worked too.

Basically, I should be good as long as I dont need to actually go to GPT disk structure.  Any questions about what I did, feel free to ask.

Having recently built a system with a 3Tb hard disk that has native 4K sectoring, I found that the maximum "standard" partition size I could create on this under Win 7 64 bit was 2Tb. In order to get the full 3Tb as a single partition, I had to go to a GPT disk structure.

I doubt this will be an issue for the majority of people at this time, as not many will be fitting 3Tb disks just yet, but nevertheless, as capacities grow, we are likely to find that the issues of EFI and GPT are going to come back and bite us, so it's good to have this kind of experience recorded in the forum.