Ghost Solution Suite

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  • 1.  GSS 3.0 PXE Boot Menu

    Posted Apr 08, 2016 12:12 PM

    Just a few questions and hopefully some guidance here. Could someone point me in the right directiont with the process of adding a program like dban to the PXE boot menu? Also with GSS 3.0 when we PXE boot it goes into WinPE to start imaging which takes quite a bit of time to load, in previous versions of ghost we it would run ghost from within a dos environment which was much faster. Any idea's here? Thanks



  • 2.  RE: GSS 3.0 PXE Boot Menu

    Posted Apr 09, 2016 11:45 AM

    I cannot answer your dban question, but I can answer the one involving DOS. The problem with DOS is that it no longer supports modern hardware. It does not understand SATA. It does not understand logical block addressing (LBA) as it used CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector). The basic capabilities of DOS to handle large disks stopped at 132Gb - it was only through Bios extensions and in some cases an increase in disk controllers from 32 bit to 48 bit addressing capability that allowed this limit to be overcome to some degree. There is also no realistic USB support, no support for UEFI bioses and no support for GPT file systems.  Unfortunately, support for all these modern innovations means that a more comprehensive disk operating system is required.

    Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was a lot easier to develop and maintain a "DOS-like" boot environment by taking their current windows operating system and removing the GUI bits, leaving just the command line parts. Sure, it's a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than DOS but the support for different hard disk chipsets and different NIC chipsets is a lot simpler to implement. You can also build boot media on USB sticks, USB drives and optical disks as well as booting over the network.  Although it may take a bit longer to boot, the overall performance gain ultimately saves you time.



  • 3.  RE: GSS 3.0 PXE Boot Menu

    Posted Apr 13, 2016 05:43 PM

    could give this a go to help the boot speed.  Seems to have mixed comments on effectivness, but its worth a shot. I tried it in my lab and did see some performance increase.  Its older, so i'm not sure if one of these bigger bar fellas, have a different opinion;)

     

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/double-your-pxe-boot-speed