Ghost Solution Suite

Looking through the forums I can only find conflicting answers.

How do I create a Recovery DVD for a large image?

The image in question is approx. 20 GB and is spanned in the default 2 GB files.

Frankly,  I would avoid using DVDs for such a large image, as you are going to need 5 or 6 DVDs to store the image and it only takes one DVD to develop a defect for the entire image to be unrecoverable.

I would recommend using a good quality USB drive with WinPE installed as the boot system. Alternatively if you need to ship the image, then a 32 Gb USB stick is much more resistant to knocks.

Ultimately. to restore an image, you need a bootable DVD with WinPE on it (DOS can be used but does not work with SATA optical drives), and also the Ghost executables. Thereafter, you could just copy your GHO and GHS images to other DVD disks - you should be able to store two per disk. Once you have ghost running, you just put in the first DVD, point Ghost at the GHO file and let it recover the image disk by disk - it will ask for new media whenever it cannot find the next GHS file.

Could I use two different USB drives?

One stick to boot to and another portable HDD to load the images off of, maybe?

How do I point Ghost to the GHO file?

Thanks for the assistance!

You can use two different USB devices as long as you are booting WinPE, which has native support for USB ports. You could even boot off a WinPE CDROM as WinPE loads and runs from memory and you can then navigate to the drive letter your USB image device gets mounted on.

The technique I have used in the past to find a specific USB device's drive letter, is to have a flag file in the root of the USB device, eg XXXFLAGXXX.txt and then run a batch file from the boot device which checks each drive letter for the existence of the flag file. When it finds the flag file, it then knows the drive letter that the USB device is mounted on, and you can go from there.  It all depends on how automated you want to make the process.

WinPE supports HTA files which are a way of creating simple GUI front ends for WinPE environments. You can then script in vbscript and/or WMI to extract more information about the target system, which could include detection of the hardware model so that the image selection can be totally automatic.