Ghost Solution Suite

I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 and installed a clean Windows XP SP3 and then I used a Ghost Boot CD ISO and took an image of the virtual drive, but now when I try to restore the image I always get missing drivers for the hard drives...How can I fix this?

 

anyone???

MS VPC BIOS is not as capable as for instance VMware BIOS and even a very minor variation in hardware can cause this. If you are on GSS 2.5 I suggest always using Deploy Anywhere to retarget your hardware before you restart VHD.

 

Some things that you can get away with in VMware will not work in VPC world.

No, I think you got it backwards...

I used MS VPC 2007 to install XP with Updates and then I captured Ghost PE ISO and used it to capture an image of the virtual hard drive (I selected drive 1 and tried saving it as .gho and .vmhdk or w/e)

 

But when I tried to restore the image to a regular p.c. and hard drive I get the error for missing the drive for IDE device Storage or I think it is the Hard Drive driver -- But can you even download a hard drive driver??

 

How can I restore the image onto a regular p.c.? Do I need to uninstall the HDD before booting to ghost PE and capturing an image?

I thought you said that you capturing VPC image and then deploying it to another VPC image. In either case - deploying an image to dissimilar hardware will cause this to happen. Hence why GSS 2.5 comes with Deploy anywhere that lets you capture a single image and then deploy it to any machine retargetting storage and NIC drivers after the deployment so that machine boots.

 

Of course you can and need to download and install storage drivers! You will have no luck booting any machine without storage driver of some sort.

 

As I said above - you can capture and deploy any image to identical machines without the need to retarget drivers. But once you deploy it to something even slightly so different in hardware - you either run sysprep or run Deploy anywhere from GSS. Otherwise you get very good chance of machine not booting.

I've got NIC and Mass Storage drivers - but it wants a hard drive driver. I've loaded any NIC or Chipset drivers, I know because all I have it saying is it needs the driver for the hard drive (maxtor). Do you know of anything for this?

No, I dont - I dont even know what machine you have :)

It is very hard game to play when it comes to machine driver retargetting. You can try doing it by hand but as I said - I'd suggest using either sysprep or Deploy anywhere from GSS 2.5 to let it figure out the drivers. This is what they are designed for.

HP Vectra VL420

 

I'm booting up manually to Ghost's WinPE-512 (768MB of RAM installed)

I restore the .gho image and exit ghost32.exe

I run diskpart to find the cd drive letter

I run ghconfig32 /findactivewindows

I run ghdplyaw32 /target=<target> /ddb=<cd\windrivers> /eval

 

and it tells me I am missing the driver for the Maxtor hard drive - you can see the exact message in one fo my earlier posts asking for help finding the driver. I run it manually because I'm nto exactly sure how to do it automatically with a Ghost cd and the console.

If you are using DA already (you havent mentioned it) then it will tell you exactly what driver is missing. Go to manufacture website and download this driver. Make sure driver comes unpacked, eg. you see INF and bunch of other driver files.

Then import this driver to database via Ghost boot wizard and then build your CD media with drivers database included. You only need to include drivers on standalone media if you have no network connection. Otherwise you can always establish network share back to driver store.

Otherwise if you are using Console and deploying image via Console you can do automatic driver retargetting the easy way.

 

Good luck.

Missing driver detected:    type = STORAGE DEVICE    PCI ID = IDE\DiskMAXTOR_6L040J2____________________________A93.0500    Desc = MAXTOR 6L040J2 ATA Device

 

 

If I use the console will it consume a license? And could I just remove the computer then?

That is what I am missing - but I CAN NOT find where to download the stupid thing!

 

No one has replied with anything about how to find that...So I can store the drive on a network share and do a 'drvload  <path>\*.inf' to load the hard drive driver without rebuilding the ISO?

 

What is automatic driver retargetting the easy way? please explain.

Do google on "MAXTOR_6L040J2 driver" - you'll get lots of hits. Pick one and download...

 

Any machine you clone consumes a license. We do not enforce it in ghost executable but it clearly states in EULA. Any machine that you use cloning tools on consumes a single license until such time that you fully remove software and wiped machine clean - please read EULA carefully.

 

No you cannot do drvload - this only installs driver to Winpe. You need to install it to just restored OS.

 

Easy way is just ticking a checkbox in Console that you want to re-target drivers at the end of the clone. Hard way is when you have to type all DA commands by hand in Winpe. Ghost implementation giude describes them all in details.

Alright, I CANNOT find this driver - I've found the maxblast tool at driverguide (after I created a free account), but I did not have time to test this - do you think this will work? I'm having doubts that I will be able to use MS VPC 2007 to make images to deploy to p.c.'s. I figured I could build an installation using VPC 2007 with minimal drivers installed so that when I restored to laptops and desktops I would have few drivers installed taking up space and minimize any errors because of newer files and such...

 

Like - I restored a Sony Vaio PCG-V505BCP with an image taken from Dell Optiplex 755 and I was getting Power Management prompts and alerts until I removed any power management software and installed the Sony crap. Also, one other thing I'm woried about is this next scenerio and how it would/could effect stability:

 

I restored that same Optiplex 755 image to Gx260's and GX270's and when I go to install the Video drivers I'm having to replace NEWER files with OLDER files or else the video resolution and color dept will not stick and will default to 8-bit VGA (640x480) after reboot. Is this okay? And, I always go ahead and run the Chipset installation(current) after image restoration just to be safe.

 

I dont know whether driver will work - you need to try it out. If driver is compatible and is the correct one for the OS then I see no reason why it should not work.

 

You can use current version of Deploy anywhere in GSS 2.5 to retarget NIC and storage drivers. All other driver we are leaving up to Windows to plug-n-play.  We will be extending DA in the next release further to cater to wider range of drivers.