Ghost Solution Suite

I am trying to save an image to a thumb drive.  The thumb drive is 128GB.  The image is less than 64.  Everytime I try to create the image it says that there is not enough space so I choose high compression.  Then it says that it needs to create another image span.  I have created images of this size on a thumb drive before without spanning them and I do not want to span them. It should just be 1 image.  I do not want to go across multiple files, please tell me how to fix this.  I cannot find sufficient technical documentation to help figure out how to stop this from occurring.  Any advice is appreciated.

What product is this for? I need to move to the right forum....

Ghost 11.5.1

Moved to Ghost forum for best visibility

Thumb drives are formatted with FAT32 by default. The largest single file supported on FAT32 is 2Gb.  If you reformat the thumb drive as NTFS you can then store files of any size up to the maximum capacity of the thumb drive.

One word of caution - NTFS is a journaling file system which means that read/write operations go on continuously. This will eventually use up the available read/write cycles of your flash memory, but unlike an SSD, a thumb drive has no built in mechanism to move data around and equalise cell wear. So don't leave it plugged in when not in use.  (That's why FAT32 is the default formatting.)

The thumb drive is formatted NTFS.  I've checked the drive and there is 119GB of free space on this drive.

What operating system are you running Ghost under?

windows 7

I would recommend making the thumb drive bootable to WinPE and run Ghost from the thumb drive. Then just image the hard disk directly.    If that still does not work, try another make of thumb drive, as their quality can be very variable.  ( A friend of mine at Oxford University did some research into thumb drives and found many use fast chips for the first block and slow chips for the rest and of course this severely impact performance or even their ability to store data reliably).

I would also like to know what size the file that does get created is?   And what drive is it stored on.   I know the desire is to have it stored on the usb drive but it sounds also like the image might be stored on the Ram drive not the thumb drive and that is why you are running out of space and getting the error.   

The default behavior would be to just create the next span and not warn about it.   If you were saving the image to the ram drive it would create the first span that filled the ram drive and then complain about needing more space to create the span.    

next time you get that error screen shot it with your phone and gather the ghost error log file and provide them here.    Also look at the usb drive to see how big the .gho file is if it was stored to the drive and not ram. 

If you do not want the image to be spanned, you may use the command line switch -SPLIT=0. Additionally, you may use a higher level of compression than 'High'. The command line switch -Z(1-9) specifies the compression level, with -Z1 being the 'Fast' compression, -Z2 being 'High' compression and -Z3 through -Z9 being higher compression than that. Of course, the higher the compression, the slower the performance.