Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

I am new to using Ghost, we have Ghost 2003. 

When used one a particular model of DELL, booting from disc, it never detects the external HDD. I have tried all the different driver options (eg. USB 1.1, USB 2 etc) but none of these seem to work.

Using the option to load no drivers works on most of the other models of DELLs we have, but this model is different. 

Is there a way to offer custom drivers for it to use? Or is there an easier way around this?  

Regards

Dave

What version of Ghost Solution Suite do you have?  If it's a Norton Ghost product then check the sticky posting at the top of this forum for a link to the Norton Community.

You have not explicitly stated whether you are booting from optical disk, floppy disk or a hard disk, and what operating system you are booting to (PCDOS, WinPE ??)

PCDOS has no support for USB ports, so if you need to access an external hard disk connected via USB, you are going to have to create WinPE boot media.

In essence, we need you to provide a lot more information about your setup before we can help you further.

What version of Ghost Solution Suite do you have?

No version, by the sounds of it. Ghost 2003 is the last version of genuine Ghost sold at retail, and is licensed for use on the basis of it being used on only a single-computer backup product (including the same licensing model as Enterprise Ghost in terms of licenses being "attached" to a PC - there's something of a "good faith" exception there as we did intend to allow home users to run it on two machines temporarily to migrate from one to the other, but it's still a single-PC product not licensed for deployment purposes).

Internally the version number of Ghost 2003 is 7.6, as the cloning code for it was branched off from the main line of the Ghost Enterprise source just after version 7.5 shipped, just before the main code line was dedicated to producing Ghost Enterprise 8.0. Note that Ghost 2003 *only* contained the DOS version, and it's been out of support for many years now, as it was a retail product and never sold as a business product (corporate editions have long windows during which the product stays officially supported, retail sales agreements don't include those).

Basically other than a Windows "wizard-style" UI intended for the product's main use as a home backup utility, the main technical difference from 7.5 to 7.6 is that a small amount of the code in the "Ghost For Manufacturing" OEM product (developed under the internal name "Phantom") had been included to allow Ghost 2003 to write images directly to NTFS volumes. More of the capabilities of that all-new code line was exposed in Ghost 8.0, but with the cancellation of Ghost entirely in 2004 - Ghost Solution Suite 1.0 aka Ghost Enterprise 8.2 was actually an end-of-life release - it never supplanted the original cloning code.

The retail versions of Ghost 2003 only supported external USB drivers, in the form of BIOS-supported access via the INT 13 API or third-party USB drivers providing access through the ASPI API (with a driver pack licensed from Iomega included in the product). A more widely compatible and faster EHCI/UHCI set of built-in USB drivers were included in the executables from Ghost 8.0 and later, but with the cancellation of the genuine Ghost retail product (soon followed by the enterprise product) we didn't get to retrofit those into a retail product line.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe

Try building a WinPE boot environment using the above, and see if your version of Ghost runs from the WinPE command line. If it does, you should be able to use the native ability of WinPE to support USB drives to enable imaging to a portable hard disk.