Norton Ghost

I have been trying to make a Norton Ghost CD 2002 CD, as in instead of having a floppy disk with ghost on it to image my HD, i make a bootable CD. I have tried to do this by making a bootable ghost floppy disk drive (which is USB and which i cant boot off on my desktop) then using nero (early version 5.1.xx i think) to make a bootable CD using the floppy disk as the source of the boot image.

I have tried both 1.44Mb default setting (several times) and the HD emulation option, and then burning to a CD-RW. But when ever i try and boot of the CD, i get boot errors. i cant remember exactly what they were (i will have another look later and find out) but they were something along the lines of invalid system disk, or boot media, replace the the disk and then press any key.

if you need an image of a bootable floppy of ghost lemme know and i will send it

Thanks, but I really want to know why the CD will not boot.

Not using windows2000 or XP are you?
I have had troubles with that myself, gave up without really trying to find out how it could be fixed.

for bootdisks you can perhaps try here:
www.bootdisk.com

Yes I have been using winXP (home and pro, on different machines) which might explain it partly. The first problem was that the floppy disk would not boot anyway. When that was sorted, I tried again, and got an emulation error and a long string of random characters bellow it.

Then I found these two sites which give usefull information about Norton Ghost, RADIFIED and the coaster factory which has a very useful program for making a bootable floppy disk for ghost.

Method I used to get a fully functional ghost boot cd, thanks to the coaster factory. This is just a modification of there method of making a self restoring ghost CD. So credit to them, and their article may also explain some of the slightly random things i seem to have done.

Firstly I copied the entire contence of the ghost boot disk with cd rom support I made using the ghost wizard to the folder GHOSTDISK on my HD.

Secondly i copied ghostpe.exe from the ghost folder, to the root GHOSTDISK folder as well, and renamed it ghost.exe so that detectCD.exe would work properly. Then I created a .bat file called ghost.bat, with the single line GHOST\GHOSTPE.EXE - what ever command line you want, and placed it in the GHOSTDISK folder.

Thirdly, using the coaster factory boot disk maker I made a boot disk. Using Nero i selected make a bootable CD, directed it to the boot disk, with standard 1.44MB floppy settings, and into the root of the CD dropped the contence of the GHOSTDISK folder.

Burnt it to CD, and ghost seems to work fine from it

Most of the files on the ISO part of the Cd are probably superfluous. I would think it would work with any version of the boot disks ghost can create for you though, as the boot part of the CD loads up the Cd drivers that are then used to load ghost.

Anyone got anything they want to add?

i have seen a mate use the norton gohst cd but he is an expert and was doing in very quick.

Whilst we're on the topic, can someone just gimme a brieft lowdown on how to use the util.

If you dont want to read http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_1.htm then the breif lowdown on how ot use it is:

Install ghost
Run Ghost boot disk wizard (and choose the CD-Rom option)
Boot of the created boot disk
Go into ghost and select the local option.
the rest is self explanitory:
Dump (i think it says) partion/drive to image creates an image of the partion/drive, in a location you select, which can be another physical disk, or another partion (partion imaging only), of floppy isk, CD-rw drive etc. If you choose a CD-RW drive it will giave you the option to make the CD bootable as well
And the other option i cant remeber exactly what its called restores a partion/disk from an image - Erasing all the data on the drive/partion you restore it to.

Easy just sit back and relax.

Thats it if you want ot know more read the above link, and if you want to deal with putting it on a CD read the coaster factory link above.

Also to add to what i said in the post about the bootable CD, you probably want maximum compression on your drive image, which would mean adding the switch -Z9 when running ghost.I.E the ghost.bat would have -Z9 appended after GHOSTPE.EXE

I'd like to relate to you a quirky experience I've had with
Nero bootable CD's. I was getting the same thing as you re. invalid media or
some such. The thing is - is the CD was OK, but I had to try booting
from it a couple of times. I thought it might be a timing thing where you
want the CD to be spinning -as opposed to spun down when WIN-- goes to
find the boot record. Then again I might be on crack. But just for the
hell of it see if you can time the closing of the cd-tray so that the disk is spinning when the first seek happens.

Do you have to run Norton ghost in pure dos, and if so will i have problems using it since my fs is NTFS?

Drive Image by PowerQuest will run itself from Windows, and it will do so, automatically, on a schedule if you wish. (it boots the machine to DOS then back again). It is so much easier to use than Ghost, I highly recommend it, along with Partition Magic. And, nobody ever has trouble running it, easy as pie right out of the box. Mine is leaving nice CD-sized image files of my system partitions on a second drive, every night while i sleep.

Something I think everyone forgot is that to boot from a cd you need CD ROM drivers added to the boot files on load.

???

Keep your panties on Shueb
Depends on the version of Ghost, I think. Later version should work with NTFS, check with Symantec to be sure. I know for sure that DriveImage works fine with ALL file systems since version #5.

i agree with rdgrimes, driveimage is probably the best for consumers, its so easy to use too.. i dont see a need for ghost unless you are doing one image for 1000+ puters for a enterprise, their network feature in ghost is great.. but i perfer driveimage..

DriveImage 2002 also does network drives.

Network feature in ghost is really great. I've been working at my high school this summer, and the graphics lab got nice new Dells with 1.8GHz P4s. (Came with flatscreens too, but we put those in the library so it looks nice). We got one set up real nice and made an image on the server and 4 ghost bootdisks. Boots up with mouse support and it takes only a couple clicks to get started. You don't need to partition or format or anything. We did the whole lab (20 comps) in less than an hour. And then the next day, we did a whole nother lab!!! (I know "nother" is not a word but it fit") We had some Gateway P4s in a lab attached to the library and they used the same NIC as the Dells (the omnipresent 3C905x) it took probably 5 min to get them started and then me and the two other techs waited and on reboot they were all done. Great timesaver. It was ghost 7 corporate, the graphics lab was NTFS (Windows 2000) and the gateways were FAT32 (Windows 98 SE).

I just came across the utility and decided to try and use it...

I noticed the strange thing also. I created couple bootable CDs with images and noticed that some computers start Ok, but others give the error (with the same disks). So, try to boot from this CD with another comp, just to check if it's bootable.

at the command prompt >ghost -ntil
You will (should) have no problem ghosting an NTFS image.