Ghost Solution Suite

Hi gurus,

I need urgent help on this issue fast! I am currently using symantec ghost version12 to do image cloning for a win 10 laptop.

It has 2 HDD, Win10 OS running on SSD 256gb  and storage running on Sata 500gb. I am trying create a image from " Disk to Image" option.

I have actually unticked the spanning options as there a limitation of less than 2GB. But the image created is always span and it will create 16 seperate parts of

the image which cannot be clone at all. Please advise!

If you are imaging to a network then you cannot stop Ghost splitting the files into 2Gb sections. This is a legacy design aspect.

If you want to save to a large single file, then you have to use something like a local USB hard drive formatted as NTFS, or a USB stick formatted as NTFS.

I am not imaging to network as i already know of the file size limitation. I am using a usb to sata cable connection to clone the image to another 320gb sata hard drive which had a ntfs file system. Could it be due to the secure boot uefi settings in bios??

Try a USB-2 external hard disk connected to a USB-2 port in case your setup does not have USB-3 drivers installed.

Also, you could try turning off the UEFI bios as I don't think Ghost 12 had UEFI support.  

Why not allow the 2gig gho and 2 gig ghs files?   single huge files are easy to corryupt and have a lot of other issues.    

In genneral if the ghost bianary can read the file system (it can't read a network share to know the file system) if it can read the file system to know that it can accept a larger file it will make the largest file available for that file system. 

I don't think that EFI is the issue but to be honnest I hadn't tested image creation to a gpt partition to see if ghost doesn't identify it correctly and then splits.   All my images I split at 2 gigs because AV and backup of singe files just has had too many issues in the past.   I am sure most of the windows issues are resolve but I still keep the 2 gig mark because of issues I have seen in the past.

This is happening on my machine as well with Ghost 12 .It is not on a network and I am saving a drive image to a different drive connected to the same SATA controller.

If I un-tick Spanning and Autonaming (and no other options are selected), Ghost ignores it, and spans and autonames. 

This might be a hint to what is happening: If I save the new settings, exit the program, and return to the program, the settings are lost. Spanning and Autonaming are ticked again.

Also, the manual says when I exit the program I should be in PE land, so I can look at or modify ghost.ini. But when I exit, the system reboots, and I don't see where that is defined.

This is weird.  I have been using Ghost running under WinPE to image to unspanned files on a local USB hard disk since early XP days.
What version of WinPE are you using, and also, are you adding the correct drivers for USB and SATA chipsets to your WinPE boot disk?  If you have a machine with USB-3 ports, you will almost certainly need to have USB-3 drivers installed as USB-3 is not natively supported by most windows versions.  Equally, although driver support for SATA-3 improves with each version of windows, depending on the version of WinPE you are using, there is a high probability that you need to add the correct SATA drivers for your version of WinPE and chipset to ensure correct drive support.  Ghost 12 does not support UEFI bioses, so those need to be turned off.
However, I would certainly re-iterate what ICHCB has stated - the use of split files is a lot more reliable in the long term than imaging to a single large file.

lester jc - 16 image files for a Win 10 image is frankly pretty standard - it's only 40 Gb.  Some of my development VMs are over 100Gb on Win 10 which would require a lot more 2Gb files than you are finding, even with the compression that Ghost applies.

Hello,

I'm seeing this problem too.  I have the lastest Ghost64 3.2 RU_4.  When creating a backup of a USB conntected SATA drive of Windows 10 Creators Fall Edition, ghost is splitting my files into 2GB chunks.  I didn't have this problem a month ago when using Ghost64 3.2 RU_1.   Perhaps, Ghost is getting confused by Windows 10 Creators Fall Edition. Has anyone opened a case on this issue?

Thanks,

Stephen

I should also mention that I'm running Ghost64 3.2 RU_4 on a Windows 10 Creator Fall Edition system while backing up a USB conntected SATA drive of Windows 10 Creators Fall Edition.

Thanks.

USB-2 or USB-3 ?  If USB-3, do you have the correct USB-3 drivers installed?  The usual reason for Ghost splitting files to 2Gb chunks is that Ghost is unable to read the file system information from the target volume. I wonder if this is the case with the USB connected drive.  Are you able to try the same process with a SATA connected drive rather than a USB connected drive? 

Which correct USB driver are you referring to?  Windows 10 uses Microsoft's built-in driver for USB-3.  I will try to Ghost the same drive via SATA to see if it makes a difference.

Thanks,

Stephen

I tried backing up from a SATA connected drive.  Ghost continues to split the image into 2GB chunks on Windows 10 Fall Creators edition.

Thanks,

Stephen

Okay.  I spoke to technical support at Symantec.  The automatic spanning problem isn't a bug, it's a FEATURE!  From now on Ghost will not create files greater than 2GB.  The thinking is that if you have any file corruption on your backup medium, the worst you will loose is one 2GB chunk.  The rest of your data will be intact.  It's the don't put all your eggs in one basket (one compressed file) philosopy. 

If you still want ONE file then you can use the following option "-SPLIT=0" when starting up Ghost.  However, this command line option isn't officially supported.  Let's hope they never remove it.

Thanks,

Stephen