I don't have any floppy drives.

It seems you need a floppy drive in order to make a boot disc.

I want to create ghost images of my drives. I would like to store them on an external hard drive.

How do I then make restores from these ghost images? Is there a way to make this work if my operating system completely dies? I want to be able to mount the external hard drive and restore the entire drive (with the operating system) from the ghost image. This seems like it should be easy enough, but I don't see how to do it from Ghost 2003. Or do I need a newer version of Ghost?

ericfree1,

See....

http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

From memory we made the retail Ghost 2003 CD's bootable as well (although some machines with defective BIOSes may not actually boot the DOS environment on those CD's successfully, the vast majority should).

I tried it. I booted successfully from the Norton Systemworks CD (which has Ghost on it). Only ghost.exe is not in the "boot drive"

Brian,

In creating the boot CD. Will it be able to see (and restore) from a external USB hard drive?

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:26pm:

which has Ghost on it

Unfortunately, we didn't master SystemWorks, that was done by a US product team we just supplied our bits to. The Ghost 2003 CDs are bootable and did have Ghost.exe in the boot package, why theirs didn't is a mystery.

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:26pm:

(which has Ghost on it)

If you can see ghost.exe on the CD you should be able to navigate to it from DOS.


Quote:

Will it be able to see (and restore) from a external USB hard drive?

I don't know.

Thanks for all the advice.

I'm just wondering if I've got the right idea:

I want to save ghost backups on external hard drives for easy storage. I want to be able to do restores of my C drive from these backups.

OK, I can try creating this boot CD (which is quite an involved process apparently), and it might be able to see the USB external hard drive.

Does anybody know offhand if there is another product (either a newer version of Ghost or one made by another company) that can do this for sure?

ericfree1,

Can you find ghost.exe on your current CD?

No. It's not there in that format. I must be created from an install program.

All that loads with the Norton Systemworks is "Norton AntiVirus: Emergency Virus Repair". I cannot run ghost from it. It also cannot see any other drive except this "RAM drive" it loads. (I'm just guessing it's a RAM drive.)

No, I meant can you see ghost.exe on the CD from Windows. Do a search from Windows. If it's there you will be able to find it in DOS. If you find it in Windows, could you post the full path to ghost.exe.

The full corporate versions of Ghost have for years had a boot disk builder in them that can do bootable CD/DVD images, and genuine Ghost 8.x and forward had its own DOS USB drivers built in (plus in genuine Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 the boot disk builder can make Windows PE and Linux bootable CD's with 32-bit Ghost and the Windows or Linux USB drivers).

The Norton Ghost 9 and up I know the guys here on these boards discovered some of those had a version of 32-bit genuine Ghost that runs in those bootable product CDs as well (which was a shock to our product team, we weren't informed they were doing that - yay, politics).

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:29pm:

I'm just guessing it's a RAM drive

Yup, it is. All bootable CDs tend to work that way - the El Torito CD boot standard is for a small RAMdisk that either emulates a floppy disk or a small HDD. If that mini-boot doesn't load MSCDEX then it can't access the rest of the files on the CD. I don't know what's on the SW CD though, never had to boot using Systemworks edition to know what they did.

wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:35pm:

"... Norton Ghost 9 and up I know the guys here on these boards discovered some of those had a version of 32-bit genuine Ghost that runs in those bootable product CDs as well (which was a shock to our product team, we weren't informed they were doing that..."

Retail boxed copies of both Norton Ghost 10.0 and the initial version of Norton Save & Restore had fully "fleshed-out" versions of RESTOREGHOST.EXE (in reality GHOST32.EXE) and GHOSTEXP.EXE onboard.  Creating a WIN PE analog on CD such as the Reatogo-X-PE as discussed in the link below provides a very useful tool for those devotees of "cold-imaging" such as myself:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1144041767/0#0 ::)

El Pescador

Thanks for the clarification as to the versions that had this, always appreciate some piscine precision :-). As I said, since no-one involved in real Ghost knww this was happening it's no surprise I'm wrong about the exact version numbers.

To add to the knowledge, Ghost 9 did have RESTOREGHOST.EXE but it could only restore. In Ghost 10, RESTOREGHOST.EXE could image as will as restore. I haven't looked at more recent Ghost versions.

Looking down thru this thread I can get lost in all the technicality.
Being a corn fed boy from Iowa, I like to keep things as simple as possible.
(K.I.S.S.) (Keep It Simple Stupid)

All the work-arounds for NOT having a floppy drive just aren't worth all the hassle.  
Don't have one......GET ONE!
 
If you can't mount a Floppy Drive in your current PC, then pick up an external (USB) floppy drive.  They are cheap at about $19 ea. and work exactly like an internal drive.  
And, you can use just the one drive on many different computers.  
Ok enough on that.

Ghost 2003 running on your HD has a routine to make a boot floppy.  That's the way it was written.  ONLY that floppy can be used to make a bootable DVD backup of your hard drive.

Now, from a boot floppy, using any decent burning program like NERO, you can make a bootable CD which looks and acts exactly like the boot floppy.
Using the HP program to make a flash drive bootable, you can also convert that boot floppy to a Flash Drive making it another exact copy of the boot floppy.

This is really simple stuff guys!  No sense getting all hyper-technical over it.   ;)

With any Ghost boot disk, floppy, CD or Flash Drive you can easily make a Ghost backup to any drive that your motherboard can see.  Then just use the same Ghost boot disk to reboot the system, select the Ghost backup image file and restore it.  

Some folks have gotten all wrapped up in loading special drivers for accessing certain drives.  I don't.  I never had the need to.

The last two motherboards I've used for my main system, present every drive on the system to Ghost.  That's an old Asrock mobo and now a MSI mobo.  If it's on the system and running, Ghost will see it.
I've even made Ghost "Partition To Image" backups of my C: drive, to my six-gig flash drive.  (using HIGH Compression, of course)

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
The Shadow  8-)

I've been followed the guide:
http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html
to make a bootable CD.

I've created the .IMA bootable image file with WinImage.

Now I just need to burn it to a CD. The tutorial shows how to do it on two old CD burning programs. I don't have those. I was searching the internet and it seems like it's not very common to burn .IMA files.

Does anyone know what product will do this properly or how to get a hold of CD burning programs mentioned in the above tutorial?

ericfree1,

You still haven't answered my question from the previous page. You may not have to build a CD.

wrote on Aug 5^th, 2008 at 1:30am:

"...As I said, since no-one involved in real Ghost knww this was happening it's no surprise I'm wrong about the exact version numbers..."

Retail boxed copies of Norton Ghost 9.0 had a truncated version of RESTOREGHOST.EXE (in reality GHOST32.EXE) that could perform a Norton Ghost Restore from *.gho/*ghs files, but not the Norton Ghost Backup capability to create such files.  I have onhand probably near a dozen of "virgin" Ghost 10.0/early Save & Restore variants - most procured for a pittance on eBay of late - after giving away several copies to family and friends to keep stashed nearby so as to "keep honest" while running Reatogo-X-PE CDs with Ghost 8.2 onboard.

Nobody in my circle - and I mean NOBODY - favors "hot-imaging" with the result that NONE of these installation CDs have ever suffered a breach of their respective paper sleeves for the GHOST32.EXE and GHOSTEXP.EXE files were instead derived from the Recovery Disk included with the 2006 edition of Norton SystemWorks Premier only to be incorporated into ISOs of assorted WIN PE CDs :o

El Pescador

OK Brian,

Yes, I found ghost.exe on the CD. It's in D:\SUPPORT\GHOST

However, when I boot from that CD, all that loads with the Norton Systemworks is "Norton AntiVirus: Emergency Virus Repair". I cannot run ghost from it. It also cannot see any other drive except this "RAM drive" it loads. (I'm just guessing it's a RAM drive.)

Is there some other way to access the contents of the CD from booting from the Norton Systemworks CD?

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 5^th, 2008 at 5:28pm:

Yes, I found ghost.exe on the CD. It's in D:\SUPPORT\GHOST

ericfree1,

Your problem is solved.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/0/29da2b96a3e397c088256d420069593f?OpenDocument&seg=hm&lg=en&ct=us

Finding what your optical drive letter is in DOS could be a challenge.

Brain,

I'm afraid my problem isn't solved.
It says I must have a floppy drive. I don't.

Wow -- this has been a frustrating journey. Lots of great guys like you giving real good advice -- lots of post to read.

But, I believe no one has the solution to:
A bootable CD that has USB drivers on it. How hard can that be?

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 6^th, 2008 at 1:09pm:

It says I must have a floppy drive. I don't.

ericfree1,

Where do you see this message? Ghost 2003 will run from your CD. Definitely.

Norton SystemWorks CD
To use this method, your computer must support starting from a boot or system floppy disk. If your computer BIOS is not configured to start from a floppy disk, consult the computer manufacturer's documentation for configuration instructions. If you use a Windows 98 Startup Disk, a Ghost Standard Boot Disk, or any other boot floppy disk, be sure that it is capable of loading CD/DVD drivers to access the CD-ROM from DOS.

I even tried it. It didn't work.

ericfree1,

Damn. I missed that.

Do you have a bootable USB flash drive? You could put ghost.exe on the flash drive.