Ghost Solution Suite

Have no problem using PXE Boot and various hardware platforms to ghost XP 2003 or Linux.

My problem is with file spanning. I've seen various articles that say that Ghost does not span image files by default unless using the switches -span, -auto, etc.

Some articles also say that the pagefile.sys and hiberfile.sys are excluded from images.

I find that this is not the case in both situations. Primarily I am concerned with file spanning right now. How do I turn it off? I've tried the "-or" switch and that doesn't seem to help.

Thanks in advance.

With respect to the page and hibernation files, how are you looking at them? The imaging engine treats them specially, so they are "in" the image in name, but name only, and by default no data from these files is actually included in the image. Instead, when you restore an image the files will be recreated as they were in the source system - but blank.

As for spanning, there are several situations where it's required and so it will be happening automatically - when cloning in DOS over a mapped network drive, for instance, the implementations of the SMB protocol provided by Microsoft or IBM do not allow working with large files and so they will span automatically instead.

To really try and force this off, use the command-line switch "-split=0" - the -split switch lets you specify a custom size in MB when to split the image, and 0 is a special case that means "never".

That seems to be working....

I have a session at 27% complete with a single image file at 3.7 GB instead of multiple 2 GB image files....

As for the hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys files. I was looking at them in Ghost Explorer. Those files existed in the image. I tried deleting them from the image but the image didn't shrink in size.

Those two files are 2.5 GB by themselves. The Image I am creating is about 14GB. 14GB is taking about 50 minutes to create. So when I deleted those two files from the image, I was left with a 11.5 GB image. Based on the data rate of the original, untouched image, I should have reduced the image transfer by 10 minutes to about 40 minutes.

This was not the case.... So I am not sure that the two files in question are 1) empty, and 2) being excluded from the image by default by Ghost.

> I was looking at them in Ghost Explorer

For these two files, if Ghost isn't storing the file data (and it definitely shouldn't be) Ghost Explorer will still show you the same information about the files - that they existed, what size they were, and so forth - that Ghost uses to recreate the files, even though the data for them isn't stored.

I have an image here and when I delete the pagefile.sys file and recompile the image using Explorer, the image doesn't get any smaller.

Thanks for the info. I appreciate better understanding how ghost works.

The only part that raises another question for me is this...
I understand that you're saying that Ghost needs to save information about these files so it can recreate them later, but why does it need to recreate them? Windows does that automagically upon the first reboot subsequent to the ghosting process.

> why does it need to recreate them?

These days, for modern editions of Windows it may not need to in the strictest sense, but there are some advantages to having Ghost preserve the amount of space allocated to the pagefile; in particular, when it recreates the pagefile it ensures that the data is located in a contiguous run of sectors on disk.

It's may not seen particularly compelling these days, but it used to be extremely useful - this behaviour has been part of Ghost for roughly a decade, and it still seems like a sensible default mode of operation.