Ghost Solution Suite

Trying to create an image of a Dell Optiplex 7040 w/ a Samsung M2 SSD.

In the PXE, Ghost is not "seeing" the Samsung SSD. It only sees the Ghost boot USB and the OS partition.

Tried toggling the drive from RAID to AHCI, no dice. No option for IDE.

Hi there!

There are a couple reasons I could see that happening:

1. Version of the Ghost executable

Can you compare the version of the Ghost executables, as well as the architecture (x86/x64)? It may be that the PXE boot image is using a lower version. What version are you using, by the way?

2. Presence of storage driver

The PXE boot image may not have the latest storage driver, which can affect that showing up. You may need to recreate your PXE boot image.

3. Version of WinPE

Is the boot disk using a different version of WnPE than the boot USB?

Thank you,

Randall Newnham

Hey Randall, thanks for your reply!

I haven't had any issues previous to this, dealing with systems with HDDs boot drives. Would the version of the Ghost executable and PXE boot image be a possible issue even if everything works fine on older, HDD systems?

I'll check to verify these PXE boot disks that we've been using to see if there's a newer driver.

It definitely could be. If you could verify the versions, that would give us more to work from.

Hey Randall. When you say compare the versions of the Ghost executables, what are you alluding to? The executables found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\Ghost?

I'm using GSS 3.1, WinPE4.0 (x64) and GhostSrv 12.0.0.8006

Just pinging this thread to see if there is a solution.

If you boot directly from your WinPE 4.0 image, can you see the SSD from the WinPE command prompt?  If not, it is almost certainly a driver issue for the SATA port to which the SSD is connected. You need to ensure that your WinPE 4 boot environment has the appropriate Win 8.x driver for the SATA chipset, matching the bit-ness of WinPE, ie WinPE 4 32 bit needs a 32 bit Win 8.x driver and WinPE 4 64bit needs the corresponding 64 bit Win 8.x driver.

Assuming this is a single SSD, the chipset should be set to AHCI mode as this will work best with the SATA drivers.

When you say "in pxe", I am assuming you are in fact referring to using PXE boot to load the WinPE image. PXE booting does nothing more than pull down a boot image from the server, and this image then needs to have its own drivers for both the NIC and the SATA chipsets.