Ghost Solution Suite

I'm trying to clone a FreeBSD 10 drive with a GPT partition and the FS is UFS.  I'm doing this on a Dell PowerEdge server with a H730 PERC.

The problem is when I try to restore the image.  I've been able to verify all the files and partitions are written to the drive and there is no FS corruption but the drive isn't bootable.

To capture the image I'm doing a sector by sector copy.  This is my command:

ghost64.exe -fx -ir  -clone,mode=create,src=1,dst=%GI% -z3

To restore the image this is my command:

ghost64.exe -clone,mode=restore,src=i:\%filename%,dst=1 -IR -OR -FFS -FNI -FIS -VDW

All of this worked on my previous servers with a PERC H710 but for some reason it doesn't work with the PERC H730.

Any help would be appriciated.

Have you checked that the partition is active, or whether any boot manager on your original system is present on the copy?

Are you using a WinPE environment to run Ghost64.exe ?  If so, does the H730 need a different driver to the H710 ?  You can check this easily enough by grabbing the PNP ID of both controllers and verifying that the INF file in the driver you are using has both device IDs in it.

Thanks for the response EdT.

The partition is active and bootable before the ghost capture.

My PE is 64bit.  I've built a new PE image to include the drivers for the H730.  The PE is able to see both the storage controler and the HDD.

The problem seems to be how ghost is writing the GPT partition. One strange thing I've discovered is I can create a GPT partition on the drive using my Windows PE and diskpart before I restore the ghost image.  When I do this, the drive is bootable when the ghost restore is completed.  This leaves me to believe that ghost is having difficulty writing the GPT signature correctly.  But I haven't been able to find a workaround.

The workaround is to use Diskpart to prepare the drive before writing the image.

It is likely that Ghost 3, currently in Beta, will fix issues with UEFI and GPT.

Actually I called Symantec support to see if they could help with the issue.  As a troubleshooting method they gave me Ghost 12.  It has a few GPT related switches but not a lot of documentation.

I've been playing around with them but so far my issue persists.  Even if I create a new image with Ghost 12.

Hmm.  Ghost 12 was an updated version that ships with DS.  Ghost Solution Suite 3.0 is a further developed product as far as I am aware. Have you tried a disk image rather than a partition image?  I also wonder whether the /IB switch might be required when creating the image, but as I don't work with any flavours of xNIX or the UFS file system, I am somewhat at a disadvantage when it comes to making suggestions.

A disk image is the only way to clone FreeBSD.  Ghost doesn't support partition images with UFS.

I've tried with the -ib switch but it didn't make a difference.  It seems that ghost isn't writing the GPT signature properly.  

Thanks for your suggestions EdT

Hi EdT and dmaximoff

I am also facing the same issue, I am using Ghost 11.5 with WinpE 6.2 as I am able to create a image with MBR partition but while restoring the image it takes more than an hour and gaves me the same issue i.e. boot device is not found after completing the restore.

Do you guys have more information on this as my hard ware spec is as per below:-

RAID 1 Mirrored with array configuration and LSI 9217 -4i4e 8 port SAS 6Gb/s RAID card

Initially file system was RAW and I converted to NTFS and GPT to MBR

but failed to write the image after. Any sugesstion!

Does your bios have UEFI enabled?  If so, you will need to turn it off as Ghost 11.5 has no UEFI support.

I notice you have not mentioned which operating system you are imaging nor any details about whether you are creating partitions on your file system before restoring the image.

Hom,

From my tests, it doesn't seem like Ghost supports GPT partitions.  Symantec support did give me Ghost 12 which does have GPT switches but thus far they've made no difference.

The only way I can make my system bootable with a ghost image and GPT partition is to boot into WinPE and use diskpart to create the GPT partition.  Then restore the ghost image.

This will make your system bootable after the ghost restore is complete.

Just as a quick update to both of you - the Ghost 3 product is just about to go into the Beta 3 release for beta testers to try, and is now very close to actual release.  I would be very surprised if this new release did not solve the problems with GPT and UEFI as the current Ghost 2.5.1.2266 release is many years old. However, do bear in mind that it will ship with WinPE 5 based on the Win 8 product as the Win 10 product is still not an official release.

EdT