Ghosting Boot CD

[BigJimbo]

Is there a way to make a bootable ghost cd (instead of floppies) to ghost an image up to a shared folder?

I have it working fine on a 3.5 but wanna get something a little faster and with it holding more space i can put more options ie (split for cd-r's and no split for pc's with DVD-Rom's) not to mention the mass array of different NIC cards we have.

I tried making a simple boot disk straight on a cd but I think it has to write to the floppy for something or another therefore the cd will not work correctly.

 

[furyalecto]

I am having the same problem. I have tried to get bootable CD's to work with ghost & have not had too much luck with our network. I could ghost disk to disk fine but it seems to want to write to the CD (we had to leave the floppies writeable.)
We are using ghost 7.5 which may be part of the issue. Soon we will have no floppies in our PC's although we do have USB floppies. We use Ghostcast a majority of the time. I have tried to use Bart's Bootable CD procedures but it still seems to want to write to it. We are using DHCP which is probably another part of the problem.

 

[BigJimbo]

The only luck i have had was with a program called WinPE. Our main IT dept uses it but its kinda tricky to setup.

All they do is put WinPE in place of the DOS disk and run Ghost from the network. They also keep the menu script on the network for easy updating

 

[Gorrillasnot]

check THIS guide out. Makes for a decent bootable Ghost CD

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm. Wierd. If I install Norton Ghost 2003, and then create an MS-DOS Ghost boot disk, then if I boot off of that disk, and then burn a Ghost image of the HD directly to the CD-burner, then it prompts me to make the disc bootable, and asked to insert a floppy. I insert the Ghost boot floppy, and it burns it. I can then start my computer using that CD, and it acts just like I had booted off of the Ghost boot floppy.
I'm not sure what problems you all are having with it. Hmm.

 

[BigJimbo]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Hmm. Wierd. If I install Norton Ghost 2003, and then create an MS-DOS Ghost boot disk, then if I boot off of that disk, and then burn a Ghost image of the HD directly to the CD-burner, then it prompts me to make the disc bootable, and asked to insert a floppy. I insert the Ghost boot floppy, and it burns it. I can then start my computer using that CD, and it acts just like I had booted off of the Ghost boot floppy.
I'm not sure what problems you all are having with it. Hmm.

I need a network boot disk to ghost the image. I know how to make the bootable CD's with the ghosted image.

I want to do is make the initial boot floppy on a CD. The only way i have found for this to work is to use WinPE and point it to a network map. But WinPE isn't a quick task takes a little time to configure. I know you can't just make a bootable CD with the same info that comes on the floppy because I think you have to write some bits of into to to the floppy

 

[BigJimbo]

Ghost run's only in FULL DOS MODE thus not from within a Windows DOS box, that's why we have created the bootdisk in previous section.
There are many options to Backup (clone) partitions/drives with Ghost (see the manual for further references), like cloning partitions from HDD 1 to HDD 2, cloning drives HDD 1 to HDD 2 etc..
But we will clone P-1 (partition 1) of HDD 1 (hard drive 1) to P-2 (partition 2) of HDD 1 (hard drive 1) using a splitted image, autoname and high compress them.
If you check out the autoexec.bat file of the bootdisk, you will find a line that starts the Ghost program it looks like this :

GHOST.EXE -fro -split=640 - autoname -z9

What exactly does this line do :

-fro : forces Ghost to continue cloning even if there are bad clusters onto the source disk
-split=640 : split the image in parts of 640 MB, so that they fit onto a CD-R/RW;
-autoname : automatically names the splitted parts of the image so that you don't have to type the name anymore;
-z9 : this parameter tells ghost to high compress the image.

If you have version 6.5 of Ghost or later you will have to change the "-autoname" to "-auto" since the -autoname is used in Ghost PE (Personal Edition).

thats what i want on the CD-R for the bootable cd
i would also include the NIC drivers and such

i was hoping i could also add a function to ask the user if they wanted to split the cd or not. (for dvd capable pc's)

 

[dcheng]

I may not understand the question, but have you also checked out ultimatebootcd.com? It's similar to Bart's PE, but it uses boot floppy images. The CD can be customized to include other images, so you should be able to add the Ghost images.