Here is what I have learned about SATA optical drives. I am working on a SATA-only (no IDE) Dell Dimension E520 without a floppy drive. There are two separate and distinct issues with SATA optical drives. One is writing the image to optical media. This is simple: you can't! I tried and I researched, but it seems that Ghost is simply incapable of writing to SATA burners. To work around this issue you have to write the image to an alternate location such as another partition, a separate hard drive, or another computer over a network. Then you can boot into Windows and burn the discs yourself with your burning software.

Now that you have the image on optical media you have to deal with the second issue of reading the discs. You must have CD-ROM drive letter access in DOS in order for Ghost to read the image. Your old boot disc probably won't work. The easiest answer for Dell owners is to use the Dell Resource CD. It is bootable, and it loads a driver you need to get access to the SATA optical drive in DOS. If you want to make your own boot disc the gcdrom.sys driver also worked for me. However, this driver required a change to a setting in the BIOS. The RAID setting needs to be changed from the default 'RAID on' to 'RAID autodetect/ATA'. It ships this way even if you aren't using RAID (one HD). Don't forget to change it back after you are done with Ghost or Windows won't boot. If you are using RAID then I don't know what to tell you. Ghost was able to see the HD with either setting. Finally, there has been mention of using switches. They had no effect in my situation. I think they might be useful for computers with both IDE and SATA.

rayking3

Thanks for your report--we need more of these to clarify how Ghost works with the SATA interface and optical drives.