I've done a lot of searching but haven't found an answer to this. I need to boot to a USB hard drive that contains DOS, DOS USB drivers, Ghost and a couple ghost images. Basically, I want to create a Ghost Disk but instead of a floppy disk or a CD, I want it created on a USB hard drive. Any ideas?

wrote on Aug 10^th, 2007 at 7:38pm:

I've done a lot of searching but haven't found an answer to this. I need to boot to a USB hard drive that contains DOS, DOS USB drivers, Ghost and a couple ghost images. Basically, I want to create a Ghost Disk but instead of a floppy disk or a CD, I want it created on a USB hard drive. Any ideas?

I can't speak to Ghost 2003 but the Boot Wizard in GSS2 almost lets you do this directly - the system we use for creating bootable USB memory sticks to deal with all the broken fake BIOS geometries works with hard disks too - by default the Boot Wizard only shows removable media (which is what USB memory sticks describe themselves as) but you can point it at hard disks too.

The "almost" part comes from a couple issues:
- for some unknown reason, the two PC-DOS BPBs that are installed in the templates are both floppy ones, not floppy and hard-disk (with FAT32 support) as they should have been
- for some unknown reason, the formatting code will only use FAT16 instead of FAT32
The end result is that the Boot Wizard will only use the first 2Gb or so of a USB device, which isn't really enough for images as well.

I made a fix for those things for GSS2.0.1, but since we didn't have the people/budget to test this it didn't get released  :(, but I've given it to some customers and not heard of any problems (and I use it myself on a 250Gb Maxtor enclosure - it's particularly nice on my work notebook since the Dell M90 BIOS will run a bootable USB device at full USB2 speed).

MS-DOS is a different story since the FAT32 BPB is a multi-sector beast. Building a FAT16 USB image in the Boot Wizard and converting it to FAT32 is how you'd have to do that.

I'm sure the guys here have a procedure to do this for Ghost 2003 users, but for GSS2 customers it's possible to arrange access to my FAT32 version of the Boot Wizard.

useful info :
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb

Regards Ben