Ghost Solution Suite

I attempted to ghost an esxi server with 1 vm, it appeared to complete just fine. When I attempted to use that image, esxi booted up fine but the datastore was missing. I used ghost 8.3.  To give a little insite into why I am doing this, this is some proprietary equipment I am working with , the contractor sends us a DVD with esxi + 1 vm it is a ghost dvd created with 11.5  I have 12 machines I need to image with this, by default what they give us needs LOTS of configuration, takes 3 hours to set up the VM, wanted to remaster the DVD or just simply use ghost server with my settings any help will be appreciated.

sorry, couldn't find the ghost forum, please move appropriately

Moved to the correct forum.

There is realistically very little information in your posting to work with. No indication of what command line settings are used to both create and to restore the image. No indication whether you have tried using Ghost 11.5 instead of 8.3 to restore.

May I recommend that you speak with your contractor and get his/her advice and support on how to get their image restored correctly.

Oh, I have found my 11.5 install disc and have updated

here is the commands I found in a bat file on the dvd

L:\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=L:\cucmEsxi.gho,dst=1:1 -batch -bfc -auto -sure -fx

the ghost image is around 2 gig and there are 3 unknown file of about 2 gig apiece probably the virtual machine I dont know if I can recreate this.

looking at the commands it pretty much just tells what file to load and do not stop...so, how does it tell it to suck in the 3 files?

when I look at the gho file in ghost explorer it says it was created with -ia,-id or -ir command, I wonder if -ir pulls the vm/datastore out?

I would still recommend you speak with your contractor about the problems you are having with the images you are being sent.

Please check the links mentioned below,

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH139493

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH139491

Since this file system is not supported ,Ghost would default to sector-by-sector clone and that could be the reason you are unable to open the image using Ghost Explorer.

I am not really needing to open the image, I am just trying to replicate what they did, so the included VMs are fully configured

Is there a problem that is stopping you speaking with the contractor?  This really seems the obvious way forward but you have not mentioned whether you have tried this solution.

if I had their contact info sure, I am chasing that now. I guess what they are doing is kinda of unique since no one has seen this before. thanks for the help tho.

There are so many different ways of both creating and restoring ghost images that it would take a very long time to find out which combination will work for you in your specific scenario.  Since it is likely that your contractor is creating an image at the sector level, there may be other dependencies in relation to the way that the virtual environment needs to be configured so that the image can be restored correctly.

what it looks like to me, is the esxi itself is the *.gho its is 2gig, there are 3 unknown files that are approximately 2gig apiece I would assume are the vm or data store, however I do not see anything in the autoexec.bat that pulls those 3 files into it, that is what is making me scratch my head

What are the file extensions on the other three files?

.001 .002 .003 but they are not ghost files.  I finally got it  to work with the -ir command, however the output is different , i get a .gho and 3 .ghs files but, you know, what ever works I was just trying to figure out how they did it.