Guys,

I have been using this for creating rescue CD sets for family and friends for the last couple of years for great success

http://users.pandora.be/satcp/ghostresq01.htm

What I¡¦m seeing now is newer Dells and even some home built machines will not boot to my Ghost 2003 boot floppies, I¡¦ve even had this happen last week, I have a friend who bought a new Dimension B110 (I think) anyway, brand new.  I Ghosted it no problem to a USB 2 external hard drive before I went in and deleted all the partitions and did a fresh install of XP home and set it up for her.  When I was all done, I tried to Ghost it again, and it hung up on boot.  I can only guess, it¡¦s the little 7MB partition that I deleted that was the key because in the past when I have deleted all the partitions and did the fresh install, I would get a boot menu asking if I wanted;

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

I then had to go My Computer and turn off show the boot menu.  Since the only thing I¡¦ve changed is the partitions.

I¡¦ve seen the thread on creating a newer USB driver, but I admit, that may be over my head.  My question, can I create Rescue CD¡¦s or DVD¡¦s with any other application?  I¡¦ve been looking at Acronis True Image, but I¡¦ve heard it has problems with corruption of the images.  I¡¦ve really enjoyed the Rescue CD¡¦s I¡¦ve been able to create with Ghost 2003 and am very bummed that they are not possible for me to do on every machine.  I hope this makes sense, I¡¦m at work and having to type quickly ƒº

Thanks all.

One good option is the use of Ghost 9 with BartPE.  See the thread “Using Bart's PE Bootable CD/DVD with Ghost 9” on this forum at:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1119240262;start=0

N0XPD wrote on Jan 9^th, 2006 at 4:36pm:

I Ghosted it no problem to a USB 2 external hard drive before I went in and deleted all the partitions and did a fresh install of XP home and set it up for her.  When I was all done, I tried to Ghost it again, and it hung up on boot.  I can only guess, it¡¦s the little 7MB partition that I deleted that was the key because in the past when I have deleted all the partitions and did the fresh install, I would get a boot menu asking if I wanted

I'm not sure what you have done with Ghost. With Dells, the boot.ini points to partition 2 because of the preceding small diagnostic partition. After deleting that small partition, WinXP continues to boot with the same boot.ini pointing to partition 2.

We discussed this in a recent thread.

Please forgive my ignorance; I'm trying to learn from you guys.  I appreciate the replies and your patience in trying to help me.  What puzzles me is I could boot to my Ghost boot floppy before I did the reinstall, after I deleted all the partitions and reinstalled Windows fresh, my Ghost boot floppy hangs at that I think is trying to detect the USB external hard drive.  Does this make any sense?

My goal is to make what I call Rescue CD sets from the “Coaster Factory” tutorial above, it has worked wonderfully until I tried to do it on this brand new Dell and some we have at work GX280, D510, etc.

Thanks for all your help, I do appreciate it.

N0XPD

If you were able to boot with the Ghost 2003 floppy boot disk before you started making partition changes--I can't think of any reason re-partitioning and re-installing an OS should change the ability to boot from floppys to DOS.

1.  Can you boot with other DOS based boot floppys to DOS?  (such as any of the boot floppys like Win98 Emergency Boot Disk, or WinMe, etc.)--see here for downloads of various DOS boot floppys:

BootDisk.com

2.  When booting, just after the computers initial *POST* procedures, and it begins to read the floppy to load it's contents--press F8.  Use the *step-by-step* confirmation of the boot process to determine exactly which line in your *config.sys* or *autoexec.bat* causes the problem.

Post the contents of *config.sys* and *autoexec.bat* here as well as the line that's causing the problem.

But, it's still strange that you had the ability to boot before you started making changes, but not afterwards--did you start using anything different between the first successful boot and now--i.e. do you have other USB devices hooked up now that were not when you first accessed the system?

On one of my systems, if I leave the USB multi-card reader hooked up, the Ghost supplied DOS USB driver can take 3-5 minutes before it will continue with the rest of the boot process--so the system *appears* to have hung.  If I disconnect that USB device and leave only the HDD connected--it takes only seconds to get past loading the USB DOS driver.