Ghost Solution Suite

I have not been able to get any real answers up to this point so I though I would reach out to the forums.

Our team uses Ghost to image hundreds of laptops and desktop computers without any issues. We are using Ghost64.exe version 12.0.0.8010.

We have recently started implementing the use of M2-NVME hard drives in some of our Lenovo P50's and Lenovos P70's. This technology is relatively new and I have experienced a tremendous amount of issues trying to get them to image properly. As a result, I would like to know officially if Symantec supports these drives or not.

Here are some examples of the problems we have been facing ...

1. We will recive the following error when trying to create an image even if we have performed a proper shutdown, "Encountered an NTFS volume with a logfile that has not been flushed".

2. M2-NVME drives in the P50 will create and restore without issue IF Windows 10 was ORINGINALLY installed on an NVME drive. However, if I built an image using a mechanical drive or Samsung 850 SSD it will restore to an NVME drive but it will fail to boot.

3. M2-NVME drives in a P70 will not image at all. If I try to create an image from an M2-NVME drive it will actually create the image but the subsequent .gho and .ghs files will be significantly smaller then they should be. The image is clearly no good because ity is obviously smaller than it should be abd does not view valid partitions or data when viewed for Ghost Explorer. If you try to restore using that image it will fail obviously. Our only recourse it to use the Samsung Magician softweare to clone a good physical drive to the M2-NVME drive.

I would love to get some feedback from Symantec on this issue and where they stand interms of supporting these drives. I would also like to see if any of you have experienced any of these issues as well.

Why don't you open a call with tech support?

I have spoken with suppport but they did not have much information at all.

The only experiance I have had with those drives at this point was on a surface pro 4 and once we had the correct mass storage controller drivers it worked as expected.

With regards to the "Encountered an NTFS volume with a logfile that has not been flushed". 

Windows 8 provides a new feature called  'Fast Startup'. When selected this feature leaves the system in a  partially hibernated state. This will leave the drive unmounted. This means that the drive is in use. Since the drive is not unmounted properly this will set the 'dirty bit' hence an "inconsistent NTFS partition" error will occur.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH211868

Make sure you are including the -IB switch when createing your lenovo images.     Lenovo has a long history of needing this when using ghost to get the entire boot track. 

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH109521.html

Hope that is useful. 

Thanks for the response. I always turn off fast startup and it was definitely off during our testing. We also always use the -IB switch.

I reached out to David Evans and I hope to get a stance on what actual support Ghost has for these new NVME drives. They are going to be everywhere pretty soon.

Story time ... I actually spoke with a guy at Lenovo recently who was pretty high up in terms of support level. I took the opportunity to ask him about the -IB switch. I told them we had been using it for 10 plus years and we wanted an update on whether it was still necessary. He kind of laughed and said that he honestly didn't know but he would recommend continuing to use it even though he was not sure. As you probably know, without it your restored machine may not boot properly. I remember the first time we restored a machine using an image that was created without the -IB switch. It wouldn't boot into windows and just sat there laughing at us with that damn flashing cursor.

That is kind of funy on the Lenovo tech.  The link to the lenovo KB I had bookmarked doesn't work any more but I know they used to have a kb noteing the need for -ib if using ghost.     My understanding was that IBM/Lenovo use all 4 sectors of the boot track.  Back in the day no one but boot sector viruses used sectors 2-4 so ghost by default ignores them unless you tell it by using the -ib to gather the entier boot track.      It has been my experiance that if you go from factory loaded lenovo to factory loaded lenovo you can get away with out the -ib because the destination system has the 2,3,4 lenovo sectors already.    But if you put in a new drive or do a disk wipe it will clear out the boot sectors and then you will be stuck.       I have also run into where the source and destination drive have to both be plugged into the machine directly you can't do a disk to disk using an external drive adapter.  I assume that it has to do with a few of the other proriatary things lenovo has done.  

All that aside they make my favorite hardware and I include the -ib on all my boot disks now just because I have a lot of lenovo hardware around me both at the office and at home.   

Looking forward to some newer systems with NVME drives to start enjoying. 

Cheers.

You mentioned building images on a mechanical drive;  have you considered building them using a tool such as VMWare Workstation?  We do all of our image developlemt in VMWare workstation and haven't had to worry too much about which hardware we are deploying to. That being said, we do get "demo" units to test on before we consider it "supported"

We have multiple images but use HII to deploy them to whatever supoorted hardware we need. Certain vendors will provide premade driver packages that you can inject once the image is layed down on hardware.  We have received one machine for testing (An Optiplex 7040 with an NVME drive) and were able to deploy our existing Windows 10 image to it with no additional changes.  Windows 7 however does not have native support, so there is some additional work to be done for Win 7 regardless of which model you are deploying to.

I've imaged a bunch of P70's these last couple of weeks without issue. Are you aware that PCI-e NVMe will not work with anything other than a GPT partition due to only being supported under UEFI boot? Admittedly I've seen articles about people getting Legacy boot working on PCI-e NVME disks but only using EFI emulators which seems ridiculous when AHCI will only service to nerf performance.

Attached is a doc from Lenovo techs about getting things working in Windows 7 in case it's of any use in future when not dealing with Windows 10 but I'm surprised you've had trouble when capturing from a P70. I've been building my images on a standard cheap SATA ssd in a Lenovo M900 set to UEFI boot and capturing from there. Our images when doing so are indeed impressively small and I think that's just due to improvements in the current release of GSS now that "optmize for size" is back as an option and I'm guess it's not capturing larger unnecessary system files any longer such as pagefiles etc. My largest W10 image that has our PDF converter software, office 2016 and other bits and pieces is only 11GB. My smallest is 6.36GB. Both images working well when deploying to Surface Books, Surface Pro 3's and P70's so far.

Not using the -IB switch here by the way. Didn't even know about it before this post!

In principal we support these drives and we have them in certain models that we test on. One thing I'm noticing is that the range of hardware technology (especially storage) is on the rise and that will always present a challenge for us when testing. We will never be able to test on all hardware variations that are out there but my position has always been the same, we will endeavor to support any new hardware that hits the market unless there is a very specific reason that we cannot. I cannot promise that we will always cover everything but I will always look to overcome any issues, even if it takes us some time. It might be necessary to work with customers directly for some of the more obscure hardware but we've had a lot of success doing that in the past.

Any issues you see need to come through our support organization and they will eventually come to me if no progress can be made using existing switches/options etc.

Thanks,

David