Ghost Solution Suite

Hello, all. My company has been using WinPE and PQIDeploy to restore images from a network share. I am working on a new solution that will allow us to image drives in advance and avoid the time it takes to boot to WinPE. I am trying to use PQIDeploy to restore our image to a hard drive hooked up to my workstation with a USB adapter.

 

I am getting an error that is somewhat inconsistent when I try this, and it usually happens when PQIDeploy tries to resize a partition. The error message is "Bad argument/parameter". I am sometimes able to make this work, but it is very unreliable. If I let PQIDeploy delete the target drives partitions, I sometimes get "Free space is too small." I can't find any documentation on this, and I'm pretty much stuck.

 

I have tried many different variations, but the command I want to use is: 

 

The script file is:

 

 
Also, even though I am using the /DBG switch, no debug log file is created that I can see.

 

 

Thanks for your time.

Hi,

 

What version/build of PQIDeploy 5.7 are you using? (type pqideploy.exe /ver at the cmd prompt). There may be a newer version available which may fix your problem.

 

With PQIdeploy there are always many ways to write your script to achieve the same result, sometimes simply reforming your script can remedy the problem.

 

Also could you please clarify why you are restoring an image to external USB HDD? Will you be booting and running the XP OS off it? Perhaps there is another way to perform the tasks in your scenario.

 

If you give me your build number and elaborate on what you are trying to achieve in this scenario we'll go from there.

 

Regards,

Morgan

Here's the output from pqideploy /ver:

 

What I am trying to do is restore an image of a Windows XP installation to hard drive attached to my workstation with a USB adapter. This will be part of our process for reinstalling an OS and some applications on one of our users' computers. What we have been doing is booting to a WinPE CD on the target computer and restoring an image from a share drive, but what I want to do is just image a hard drive and take it out to the computer. This saves us a trip to the user's office and the time it takes to boot to a WinPE CD.

 

I read something about problems with Vista PE CDs and images made on an XP system. Is there a difference between images made on Windows 2000 versus Windows XP systems? The workstations I am using for testing are running Windows 2000, but I believe our WinPE discs are XP-based.

There are new builds of PQIdeploy and PQdisk released with GSS 2.5

These two components (in all their flavors) are at build 1515 now with GSS 2.5. There was a lot of improvements made specifically to the resizing functionality so I would suggest you upgrade. It might be good time to move over to using the Ghost tools instead as the DCL components are slowly being phased out.

 

Worth a mention of GSS2.5 is the capability of ghost to restore PQI images (primary partitions only) so you need not even create new images in most cases when moving form the DCL tools. Ghost also has the resizing on restore functionality you are using in you pqideploy script.

 

Anyway, on to your problem:

I've done some brief testing on win2k of your scenario and I am getting similar results. PQideploy seems to be running into problems when trying to resize the destination partitions although not explicitly apparent by the error messages, the debug file has a bit more info. To get your debug file try giving a location and name as arguments to the dbg option ie /dbg=test.dbg (this is working for me).

I tried the same scenario from winXP which worked.

 

I then found the culprit to be the /nsu switch, as once I removed this option your scenario was working on win2k also. PQIdeploy comunicates with the OS at certain stages in its operations even when you are using the /nsu (no system update) option, it seems that this option in win2k is not behaving well. The newest build 1515 with GSS 2.5 has improvents made in this OS/PQIdeploy communication which fix this problem.

 

So, please try the workaround of removing the /nsu switch and let me know how you get on.

 

Regards,

Morgan    

Thank you very much for your help. I found that the debug file was being created, but while the log and err files were placed in the same directory that I ran PQIDeploy from (my desktop), the debug file is created in the same directory as PQIDeploy (my S:\ drive). I have done some testing on Windows XP and PQIDeploy has very consistently written our images to drives attached with a USB adapter. I will definitely look into getting the latest build, but in the mean time, we will move to Windows XP computers for drive imaging. Even without the /NSU switch, my Windows 2000 machines are having problems with PQIDeploy.

 

Thank you again for your time.