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Rad Community Technical Discussion Boards (Computer Hardware + PC Software) >> Norton Ghost 2003,  Ghost v8.x + Ghost Solution Suite (GSS) Discussion Board >> Ghost Boot DVD
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Message started by Glen on Feb 20th, 2006 at 12:41am

Title: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by Glen on Feb 20th, 2006 at 12:41am
Greetings.

Firstly, thanks to Nightowl and everyone at Radified for the "Guide to Creating Bootable CD/DVD's without A:\ Floppy Drive". Only one problem, it didn't work for me. :'(

Followed the guide word for word the first time, it booted to DOS and did it's thing, but wouldn't run Ghost (giving various errors such as "invalid command or file name" or "CDR101 : not ready reading drive X - abort, retry or fail").

Removed the mouse drivers on the second attempt (for no particular reason other than that they're unnecessary) and also downloaded new drivers for my Pioneer DVR-110 (from their website) to replace OAKCDROM.SYS because the error messages seemed to suggest it couldn't be read. Anyway, none of this help much either, Ghost still refused to run.

So here's where things stand at the moment...



AUTOEXEC.BAT
ATAPICD.SYS
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
IO.SYS
MSCDEX.EXE
MSDOS.SYS
GHOST (directory) with GHOST.EXE

AUTOEXEC.BAT...
@echo off
mscdex.exe /d:ghost /l:d
echo Loading Ghost
CD GHOST
GHOST.EXE

CONFIG.SYS...
device=atapicd.sys /d:ghost
LASTDRIVE = Z



Another thing is, that my hard drive is SATA and formatted with NTFS. Would that mean that any other drivers are required?

If anyone knows what's going wrong here, your help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Title: Re: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by NightOwl on Feb 20th, 2006 at 9:40am
Glen


Quote:
Followed the guide word for word the first time,

Those error messages suggest that the drive letter for the optical drive does not match the path commands in *autoexec.bat*.

From what you posted, it looks like you may be altering the steps from what's stated in the Guide:


Quote:
AUTOEXEC.BAT...
@echo off
mscdex.exe /d:ghost /l:d

You are assigning your optical drive with this switch, */l:d*, drive letter D:\--but if you have more than one partition on your HDD, then this command will be ignored, and your optical drive will be the next available drive letter after all HDD partitions have been assigned.  But, your error message:


Quote:
"CDR101 : not ready reading drive X - abort, retry or fail"

suggests you are looking for your optical drive at *X*--which it will not be!.

And there is no *path=....* statement in your *autoexec.bat*, so DOS does not have a list of drive letters and/or sub-directories to automatically search in its attempt to carry out the commands you have in *autoexec.bat* or typed at the A:\ prompt.


Quote:
it booted to DOS and did it's thing,

Hmmmm...*did it's thing*--you will have to be a little more explicit in indicating what worked, where the boot process stopped, and where you were left after the boot files had been executed (i.e.--were you left at the A:\ prompt?).


Title: Re: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by Glen (Register Failed) on Feb 21st, 2006 at 2:01am

Quote:
Those error messages suggest that the drive letter for the optical drive does not match the path commands in *autoexec.bat*.

From what you posted, it looks like you may be altering the steps from what's stated in the Guide.

You are assigning your optical drive with this switch, */l:d*, drive letter D:\--but if you have more than one partition on your HDD, then this command will be ignored, and your optical drive will be the next available drive letter after all HDD partitions have been assigned.  But, your error message suggests you are looking for your optical drive at *X*--which it will not be!.

And there is no *path=....* statement in your *autoexec.bat*, so DOS does not have a list of drive letters and/or sub-directories to automatically search in its attempt to carry out the commands you have in *autoexec.bat* or typed at the A:\ prompt.


Thanks for the reply, NightOwl.

In regards to your comments, I did follow the guide word for word the first time, but when it didn't work, I tried fiddling around. The error messages were what happened the first time, the list of files, contents of AUTOEXEC.BAT and contents of CONFIG.SYS are my newer versions, which is why they're quite different from what the guide says.

As for assigning my optical drive to D:\, it shouldn't matter because my hard drive only has one partition, in fact, there's no problem in my very latest version of the boot DVD. It doesn't quite work, but there are no problems with having the optical drive as D:\.

Does having a path=... statement make a difference? Most of the files are in the root directory anyway, and AUTOEXEC.EXE changes the directory when GHOST.EXE needs to be run.


Quote:
you will have to be a little more explicit in indicating what worked, where the boot process stopped, and where you were left after the boot files had been executed


Sorry about that. On the first attempt (using the guide directly) it would load the drivers, run MSCDEX.EXE successfully but then fall over when it tried to run GHOST.EXE, and left me at the A:\ prompt. Then, it wouldn't let me open the X:\ drive (my optical drive, giving that CDR101 error.



Anyway, just a few minutes ago I had another attempt at this. It booted, loaded the drivers and so on until it tried to change to the Ghost directory, where it said "invalid directory". It then tried to run GHOST.EXE, but it was obviously in the wrong folder because the previous line didn't work and so gave an error - "bad command or file name".

So, I changed to D:\ drive (my optical drive) and typed "dir" to check the contents (I put an extra copy of GHOST.EXE on the DVD, outside of the boot image, when I burnt it) and sure enough, it came up with GHOST.EXE there by itself. This was looking good, but when I tried to run it, that error message popped up again - "bad command or file name".

Any ideas?

Title: Re: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by Glen (Register Failed) on Feb 21st, 2006 at 5:54am
Never mind, it finally works. :D

And after all this I'm not even sure what the problem was. I'd like to say "and I don't care either", but I do, but it's just going to have to be one of those things, cause the point is it's working.

For anyone who's interested, this is how it was set up in the end.

AUTOEXEC.BAT
ASPICD.SYS
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
GHOST.EXE
HIMEM.SYS
IO.SYS
MSCDEX.EXE
MSDOS.SYS
OAKCDROM.SYS

AUTOEXEC.BAT...
LH MSCDEX.EXE /D:Ghost /L:D
GHOST.EXE

CONFIG.SYS...
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=OAKCDROM.SYS /D:Ghost
DEVICE=ASPICD.SYS /D:Ghost
LASTDRIVE=Z

Again, a big thanks go out to everyone for the awesome resources here, especially NightOwl for this guide, cheers mate.

Title: Re: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by NightOwl on Feb 21st, 2006 at 8:54am
Glen

Thanks for the follow-up posts explaining *what-was-what*, and what finally worked--


Quote:
And after all this I'm not even sure what the problem was. I'd like to say "and I don't care either", but I do

I care too!--but if you followed the Guide originally, I don't know what the problem would have been.

I can see a difference between your original setup and the one that's working:

[original config.sys]

CONFIG.SYS...
device=atapicd.sys /d:ghost
LASTDRIVE = Z

[working config.sys]

CONFIG.SYS...
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=OAKCDROM.SYS /D:Ghost
DEVICE=ASPICD.SYS /D:Ghost
LASTDRIVE=Z

Could explain the function of what appears to be a second optical drive DOS driver--*DEVICE=ASPICD.SYS /D:Ghost*?

I was going to suggest that you press F8 when your system begins to load the boot files, and use the *step-by-step confirmation* option so the system stops after each DOS command so you can record the error message for any command not properly executed.


Quote:
Does having a path=... statement make a difference? Most of the files are in the root directory anyway, and AUTOEXEC.EXE changes the directory when GHOST.EXE needs to be run.

If the *Ghost.exe* is in the root directory--the path statement should not be needed--but in your original post you have this:


Quote:
AUTOEXEC.BAT
ATAPICD.SYS
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
IO.SYS
MSCDEX.EXE
MSDOS.SYS
GHOST (directory) with GHOST.EXE

But, that does not explain what wasn't working correctly when you followed the Guide for the first time step-by-step.

But, glad to hear it's now working--let us know of any future questions, problems, or comments.....

Title: Re: Ghost Boot DVD
Post by Glen (Register Failed) on Feb 21st, 2006 at 10:59pm

Quote:
explain the function of what appears to be a second optical drive DOS driver


After looking at various other guides, alot of them had a whole heap of drivers for optical drives. Not being an expert on DOS, I'm not sure on what everything does, so I decided to just chuck in this ASPICD.SYS driver (most other guides seem to use this, as does the Ghost Boot Wizard). If it's unnecessary, I'll just remove it.

Anyway, I'm glad everything's over and done with. Even if it's not perfect, it doesn't make any difference in terms of functionality.

Thanks.

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