Ghost Solution Suite

I have manufacturing machines that use Siemens 840d controllers. They have Windows  Xp Embedded Systems that have Symantec Ghost 8.2 Corporate Edition installed. 

I cant get Ghost to create a bootable USB with the "Eboot" software. I try to connect a 500 GB external HDD formatted as NTFS but it will not recognize it. 

I was wondering if this old version of Ghost is capable of recognizing this big of a drive. I also get an error that the CD/DVD write functionality is not available. I'm hoping this error is only because i do not have a CD/DVD drive installed and is unreleated to my USB discovery issue 

What Pre os are you using?    I have a 2 tb usb drive that I save my images on.  but I am using windows pe 4 and later.   

When you boot up if you exit ghost can you see the usb drive?   If not the issue is that the boot environment that you are using is unable to see the hardware.   Try a later version of the pe rather than the dos that is likely in use if you are still using 8.2. 

You can alsways test a usb 4 gig thumb drive.  can you see it?   if not then the issue likely isn't the size of your drive just a thought on how to divide an conqure on this one.  

It is the operating system and not Ghost that needs to be able to handle USB.  As ICHCB has noted, DOS is way out of date for modern hardware as it has no support for USB, or for SATA or even for large hard disks. Using WinPE is a must if you want a trouble free life, and it also supports USB-2 natively and can support USB-3 if you load the appropriate drivers for your USB-3 chipset.  I have in the past successfully run an even older version of Ghost than yours from a WinPE 2 bootable USB stick and USB hard disk and imaged drives using a control program on the USB hard disk to detect the target hardware and offer the technician the appropriate image(s) for that machine.

Here are a few links which may help:

https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe    (also link through to the WinPE 3.x version of this)

https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/do-i-have-correct-driver-winpe

https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyutility-assist-identifying-plug-and-play-drivers

https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-and-using-winpe31-image-gss-251

I do not understand where you are getting DOS from. The Siemens 840d controlls have Windows XP embedded systems. They have a procedure to boot into their (siemens) service center. Through this service center you can launch Ghost and other utilities. It is a GUI environment.

Now that you said USB 3.0 and its compatibility, i am beginning to think they might not have drivers for the 3.0. 

Also, these drives are 40GB, If I use a 32 GB flash drive will i be able to make an image since the source drive is bigger than the destination? Probably a dumb question but not sure. They are probably only using about 10-15 GB of space

byates2,

Because Ghost compresses images, 32GB would likely be enough. If the machines are running Windows XP Embedded, I have a serious doubt that you'll have any luck with USB 3 technology.

Thank you,

Randall Newnham