Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

We are trying to use ghost to make copies of bootable USB flash disks.  So far from our first test, ghost seems to make a disk to disk copy of a flash disk, but the MBR did not seem to come across properly.  The copied disk will not boot.

We are running ghost32.exe from within Windows 7.  Ghost32.exe is from Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, so this is version 11.5 of ghost32.exe.

Does anyone know if what we are trying to do will work with ghost?  Are there any special parameters we need to use to get the bootable portion of the USB flash to work?

If not, does anyone know any other tools that can be used to make copies of bootable USB flash disks?

Ultimately, we are creating USB flash disk images of OS deployments for both workstations and our embedded Windows based thin clients.  So we need to make copies of these master images for our helpdesk staff and remote technicians to use to deploy images.

Thank you,
Kevin

Bootable USB sticks almost universally need to use a much more elaborate boot sequence than normal media, because PC BIOS manufacturers never really agreed on any kind of bootability specification for such devices. USB devices use the SCSI model of a linear sequence of sectors, whereas for bootability purposes the PC BIOS has to decide how to present that work in terms of the Cylinders, Heads, Sectors model that the BIOS APIs usually used by MBR code employs.

Although there's a reasonably well-understood way of doing this for hard disks in use since the early 1990's (although some manufacturers such as HP *still* don't always use it by default), BIOS vendors took wildly varying approaches to this for USB bootability, and as a result it was sometimes impossible to format a USB stick in a machine because it was literally unknowable how the BIOS would present it.

The end result of this is that bootable USB sticks universally contain at least one and possibly several additional boot sectors in addition to the traditional MBR (whose code is usually shuffled down a few sectors). This is actually an old technique called a "drive overlay" which was first used in the early 90's to allow machines to boot from large hard disks before BIOS manufacturers got around to slowly adding support for them.

The initial boot sector in this case replaces the CHS translation scheme chosen by the BIOS's legacy API emulation (which varies depending on system and so cannot be trusted) and installs its own code to provide that API, after which it then reads the relocated original MBR and proceeds with the normal boot process.

The end result of all this is that to clone these reliably using the Ghost tools, you normally need only add the "-ib" switch to the Ghost command line when capturing an image (or copying a disk) to request that it include the entire boot track of the source disk. Doing this when an image is created implicitly causes that boot track to be restored during a full-disk restore without needing additional switches. This works because it's generally the "unused" sectors of the boot track which contain the additional boot code to provide the disk API emulation and the relocated MBR boot code.

Thank you for the very detailed response!

You represent your organization very well.