Big problems with Symantec Ghost... USB, keyboards, etc.

[SharkyTM]

Basically, I'm hitting my head against the wall on this one, but i'll post so you can hack at it.

I'm trying to image to and from HP D530 Ultra-Slim Desktops. 4x USB on back, 2xusb on front, CD/DVD drive, no floppy, no PS/2. Little workstations we use in a hospital, and the bane of my existence.

I have to use USB keyboards/mice, and USB floppies. No way around it.

If I use the Ghost boot disk as is, I either:
1. get an unable to locate command interpreter error, OR
2. Get no keyboard or mouse use after the first 3 seconds.

My old Ghost disks used to work (made with Ghost 2003), but now they give me the command interpreter error, no clue why they stopped working, maybe the new motherboards i installed (old ones had bad capacitors).

If I unplug both hard drives, and use the old floppy, i get the Ghost screen to come up fine, but no mouse/keyboard. If i unplug both drives and use the new one, i get no mouse or keyboard either.

How the heck can I image these machines?

 

[KLin]

take the hard drive out, put it in a machine with a hard drive enclosure, and ghost it that way.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Acronis True Image creates a bootable CD that supports at least USB mice, don't know about USB keyboards. www.acronis.com

 

[warcrow]

2 things:

1) Check the BIOS and make sure it has "enable USB mouse/KB support" enabled, if it even has the option.

2) When you create the image, make sure you're including the USB drivers in the image. Ghost should prompt you for this.

 

[SharkyTM]

I've tried all that (except Acronis). I found that if I left the mouse unplugged and let it error out with "unknown command intepretter", and typed in "A:command.com", it would give me the prompt. I then typed in autoexec. This begins the boot-up sequence again. It asks for the 2nd disk, containing the ghost.exe file. I put that in, and it will load to a point, then stop, but if i unplug the usb floppy and replug it in, the machine will recognize it, and attempt to read ghost.exe. It will fail, giving a page fault/read fault error. Then i get the command prompt again. If i type "ghost.exe", it will work correctly.

What a screwed up way around this.