Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

I have a .GHO file that i need to restore onto a Till. Is there anyway i can restore this file using a USB Memory stick, and does anyone have any instructions? I currently have a Symantec Ghost Suite Trial, to practice with before Purchasing a full version.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Benjy

using the ghost boot disk wizard make your USB drive a bootable disk.  then just copy your .gho files to the drive.  boot from the disk and select "disk" then "from image" and point it at your .gho file.  its going to take a really really long time, usb flash drives are slow.

Also a question, i am doing the same but i hadn't compressed the image and had spanned, leaving *.ghs files also.

I want the whole image within a *.gho and not have any *.ghs files kicking about, what is the best method from getting the image via a multicast to this state?

Thanks in advance!

in general due to file size limitations of certain file systems (FAT16) ghost likes to keep its individual files just under 2gb each.  the first 2gb file is image.gho and every 2 gb after that a .ghs file is added.  if you can get your image down under 2gb when compressed it would be ideal.  you can however use the ghost command line option of -SPLIT to change the default image size but over 2gb wont work using a dos based boot enviroment.  if your using winPE though it would be a good option for you.  heres a thread on that:

www.symantec.com/connect/forums/9gb-gho-file

USB memory sticks are invariably formatted as FAT32 because using NTFS, which is a journaling file system, will eventually use up the read/write cycle limit of flash memory. FAT32 has a file size limit of 2Gb. Thus you can either accept your images are going to include GHS files also, or reformat your USB stick to NTFS and accept it may have a reduced lifespan if used extensively for other tasks.

Is there a way, once you have created the bootable USB and copied in your Ghost files to make the restore start automatically upon boot - i.e. boot from the stick, the imaging of the machine starts automatically and when complete it reboots?

when creating a bootable USB-stick/drive you only have to add some switches to the ghost.exe -xxxxxx command.

service1.symantec.com/support/on-technology.nsf/docid/1998082612540625

This is the list of switches, which will help you to succeed with your mission ^^. You only need to source and destination information, confirmation and restart switches.

greetings

alexander emmer

Thanks!

So I would want to have a command like this?

ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=\image\image.gho,dst=1 -sure ??

From what I can gather mode=load will flatten any existing data and restore my new image over the top?

Also, was a bit unsure about the src - if the image is in the root of the USB stick in a folder called image is my syntax correct? Does Ghost assign the stick a drive letter & if it does should I be calling the image from that drive letter?

You have the right idea with the command line, but until you know the drive letter that the USB stick mounts on, you will not be able to restore the ghost image.

What I would recommend is that you use a batch file which first searches each driver letter for a copy of GDISK32.exe that you place in the root of your USB stick, and then calls GDISK32.exe to recreate clean partitions.
As the USB stick drive letter is now known, you can then call ghost.exe with the correct image location to deploy your image.
However, I would not recommend automatic reboot, coz if you miss the reboot point, it may just kick off another rebuild session, depending on how your boot order is set in the bios.
Better to display a message at the end of your batch file telling the user that the process has finished, and that the USB stick should be removed and the machine rebooted with the three finger salute.