Ghost Solution Suite

[GSS 2.5, Console 11]

Hey all, new member here. I am taking over a Ghost environment at my new company and have some questions. The person who originally set up the system had it running on an old Dell 2500 server with Windows 2k. I was brought in to virtualize everything here, so needless to say, that machine went first.

I am now running a Server 2K8 R2 machine, have Ghost installed and have a new domain and complete lab set up. I am trying to deploy an image to a few machines now, and am running into some issues. As the title states, using Ghost Boot Wizard, I have attempted to prepare a 16GB USB drive with an 8GB .gho image (and the spanned image files), booted into Ghost, and am at an impasse. I can boot into Ghost (WinPE), can navigate to the .gho image file, but Ghost will not recognize the destination drive. I am deploying to a 1TB (931GB) virtual drive (actually 2 1TB physical drives in RAID1), and cannot get Ghost to see the drive. Any tips? Has anyone seen this before? Is it because the 16GB drive isn't the same size? Should I try a portable 1TB drive?

I guess I'll just throw my other issue in here briefly as well. The person who originally set all of this up built a few network boot disks so these guys could just plug the destination machine into the switch, connect to the Ghost server and pull an image. After switching servers, these boot disks obviously don't work anymore. I have been scouring the web trying to figure out how to build a new version of these (preferably USB instead of CD), and am having no luck. I built a new domain for this lab network where we do all of our imaging, and using a version of Ghost that is on the latest Hiren's Boot Disc, I am able to connect to the Ghost Cast Server, though in testing a capture took 8+ hours and a restore took 7+ hours. That can't be right. If anyone has experience building network boot disks from scratch, I'd love some help. The previous person said they used netbootdisk.com to build the disk, but it's geared toward having a floppy drive, which we do not have.

I know that I put a lot in here, and we have an order of 40 servers coming in between today and tomorrow that I would love to use the new setup with, but if anyone has any insight for me I would sincerely appreciate it. I can fall back on the old Windows 2K machine, but would REALLY rather not! 

Thanks in advance,

Jeff

First of all Welcome!!

The version of WINPE used under Ghost Boot Wizard is 2.0,which is light weight version of Vista 32 OS.The server has RAID 1 configuration,which means the drivers for the RAID controller should be added under WINPE, for it to recognize the drive(s). 

Please download Vista 32 drivers and add it under Ghost Boot Wizard and recreate the boot package,by following the steps in the article mentioned below ,

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH110136

If Vista 32 drivers are not available ,atleast look for Server 2003 drivers and add the same as Vista .

Thanks for the quick reply, Maneesh. I will download those drivers to see if that resolves the issue. I'll give it a shot and post back the results.

Thank you!

-Jeff

Please let us know the make and the model of the Server

It's a Dell R710 (also a couple T710s), with integrated RAID controller H700. I have pulled the latest drivers from the Dell site:

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/555

I am just finishing building the new WinPE (512) version to USB key, and will be testing in the next couple minutes.

After installing the appropriate drivers, and selecting Windows PE - 512, it is successfully deploying the image right now. Thank you so much for your guidance, this is going to greatly increase my productivity :D

Best regards,

Jeff

Good to know that the driver addition resolved the issue.