Question for Ghost Gurus

[aceman817]

At the local school where I work, we're trying to image a computer lab and have made a ghost image to an external drive using a bartspe disk and the ghost32.exe. We transferred the ghost file and the spanned file (around 4GB total) to a workstation with a DVD burner and used Nero 7 to burn a bootable DVD with a 98se boot disk image and ghost.exe. When I took the DVD to a system in the lab, I chose to boot with CDROM support and ran the ghost.exe file. I then chose the image file within the program and received an error about a span file. It would not start the ghost. The image appears to be intact and it opens fine in Windows with Ghost Explorer. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Has anyone ever made such a bootable disc? I'm not looking for anything fancy, just something that works. I think a bootable DVD is the easiest way to go.

 

[Nothinman]

DOS can't access files >2G, the file you created with ghost32 is too big so recreated it with smaller chunks.

 

[aceman817]

That makes sense! The .gho file is over 3GBs and the .ghs file is over 2GB. How can I recreate it in smaller chunks? I'm using Ghost Corporate 8.0.

 

[Nothinman]

Ghost has an option to split the file, I think you can just tell it how big to make each chunk.

 

[aceman817]

Yes. I checked in the manual and it says I can do it using Ghost Explorer. Thanks for the help!

 

[Nothinman]

Personally, I would have just remade the image but if Explorer works too go for it.

 

[aceman817]

I used Ghost Explorer to set a 1800MB size limit for each span and then chose the compile option. I made the DVD and am still getting the same error. It says:

"d:\myimage.gho is not a Symantec Ghost file.
Or it is not the correct span segment.
Task can not be completed."

What should I try to do? How can I try remaking the image with spanning enabled to ensure the files are less than 2GB?

 

[aceman817]

I just realized that I created the image with Ghost 8.2, resized and recompiled it with the Ghost Explorer 8.0, and tried to restore it with ghost.exe version 8.0. I'm wondering if the version mismatch has something to do with it. If so, I will recreate the image with ghost 8.0, but what options or switches should I use when I create it to ensure each file is less than 2GB?

 

[Nothinman]

Inside of the Ghost GUI there's an option to set the max size IIRC.

 

[aceman817]

Do I need to use any switches or just launch the ghost.exe from my external drive within Bart's PE? I don't see such an option in the "Options" menu.

 

[aceman817]

If I run ghost32.exe with the "-split=1000" switch, it seems to show up under the "save settings" tab as spanning. I'm a little confused on the difference between splitting and spanning.

 

[aceman817]

I just remade the image with 1500mb as the file size limit, reburnt it all with ghost 8 and I still have the same error message!

 

[aceman817]

These workstations have SATA drives and I'm wondering if that has something to do with it.

 

[Nothinman]

Shouldn't matter, as long as you can access the drive to make and restore the ghost it should work.

 

[aceman817]

Well that's what I thought but I'm just trying to think of anything that may be the culprit. The image is fine, there is some kind of issue reading it from DOS.

 

[aceman817]

How about a boot disc as described at http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/elghost/#aboutghost?

 

[Nothinman]

DOS sucks, why are you still using it?

 

[aceman817]

I know DOS is old. I'm just looking for the fastest and best way to make a bootable ghost DVD. I don't care if it uses DOS, a preinstallation environment, or whatever.

 

[Nothinman]

Then try restoring the ghost from the PE disc, if that works you know the image is good and it's a DOS problem.

 

[aceman817]

It works fine from the PE disc, but it just takes a few minutes to load to memory and I need to use an external hard drive with it. Maybe there is a way for me to make a Barts PE disc on a DVD with ghost32.exe, the spanned ghost image, and a minimal boot to save time.

 

[Looney]

I'm almost positive there is a ghost plugin for Barts PE.

 

[aceman817]

Yes. I think there is too. I'll check into it over the next few days and see what I can come up with.