Ghost Solution Suite

I have a copy of GSS 2.5 (Ghost Console shows version as 11.5.0.2113) that I have started using for capturing over-the-net backups of PCs.  I have had a mixture of successes and failures with Windows XP and Windows 7.  Some problems I have experienced:

* on 1 XP system, using PreOS, the capture gets slower and slower until it eventually stops prematurely

* on 1 Win7 system, Ghost backup failed, and attempts to reboot brought up preOS instead of Windows7 (booted into PC-DOS about a dozen times before booting into Win7)

* on 1 Win7 system, Ghost backup (using PC-DOS preOS) failed, and then the system would not boot up into Windows (had to be repaired)

* on 1 Win7 system, Ghost hot backup (with Volume Shadow service started, Windows Firewall off, with or without -forcevolumesnapshot) fails with no ghosterr.txt file.  Creates a non-text .dmp file.

In summary, when it works, it works great.  But when it fails, getting past the failure can be a struggle.  Wondering if those of you who have used both 2.5 and 3 have seen a significant reduction in issues like the aforementioned ?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

Using PC-DOS as a pre-OS is pretty much asking for trouble on any modern hardware. PC-DOS has no SATA support so unless you have enabled legacy hard disk support in the bios, it will not read the hard disk. Disks larger than a certain size will also fail as DOS uses CHS addressing whereas SATA uses LBA addressing, and DOS has a 32 bit limit on addressing whereas you need 48 bit for larger hard disks due to the sheer number of sectors they contain.

With WinPE boot environments, you need to ensure that the correct Vista 32 bit drivers are present for the hard disk subsystem if you are using the version of WinPE that ships with Ghost 2.5.  Using WinPE 3 you can then adopt Win 7 drivers and there are tech articles on how to do this for Ghost 2.5.

Might I suggest using folder redirection or roming profiles to avoid having to back up computers in the first place?  

If not, why not use Windows 7 backup to network share?  It supports image recovery and GSS could push a script that configures all that.  

If you need to keep doing image backups, I agree with EdT that Windows PE is a modern preboot environment and should serve you much better.  We do all kinds of of fun scripts in the WinPE 4 environment and I'm sure you could get Ghost to consistently get backups and replace the existing version file.  Or you could using DISM /append-image to take incremental backups of the computer in question.  WIM images can be opened with 7zip which is much quicker than trying to mount them.  

With the release of GSS 3.0 HF3 we now support automation folders so booting to WinPE will be very fast. It's definitely worth a look. Release notes here: https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.DOC9111.html

Thanks all!

My current focus is on doing "hot" Ghosting (while the native OS is running) instead of booting to PreOS.  I realize this has some disadvantages (eg some running databases may be saved in corrupted state), but I have run into trouble a few times when doing "cold" (preOS boot) Ghosting via virtual boot partition.  For example, one Windows7 PC had to be repaired in order to boot after I attempted Ghost backup of it.  On another occasion, the PC kept wanting to boot to the preOS instead of booting to the native OS - after about a dozen tries it finally booted to the native OS.

Thanks for getting me off of the PC-DOS track for "cold" Ghost backups.  I think the reason I started with PC-DOS is because I found an easy way to lock the mouse/keyboard, whereas for WinPE I did not find an easy way to lock them (the one solution I found required rebuilding WinPE image as I recall).

I will review your comments/references above.  Note that I have not tried GSS 3 yet (still only have GSS 2.5)...

Regards

Lor64

Thanks again all - I am having success using the built-in Windows backup utility on Windows 7 (and 10).  For XP and older I will continue to use GSS and Ghost.

Splitting Solution between Mike and Ed for the helpful comments.

Thanks again all !!!

Please let me know if I should post a new thread (see below):

Now I am stuck on recovering from *.vhd (on portable USB drive) to PC drive.  I follow instructions for recovering using Windows7 repair disk, but in the image recovery GUI it will not see the USB drive.  I tried installing USB drivers but get errors.  Oddly I can see the USB drive from the repair disk's command prompt, just not from within the image recovery GUI.

I found some other directions for using diskpart, but when I select a *.vhd it gives "image corrupt" error.

Perhaps the way to do this is install Windows7 and then restore the image from within Windows7 itself ?

Or maybe I need to use Ghost - is there any version of Ghost that supports restore from *.vhd ?

Best regards