Earlier I had asked for HELP, since I couldn't see my external hdd in the drop-down menu in Ghost 2003 build .793.

I'm rather embarassed to admit that I solved my problem by finding out that I need to wait about a minute after starting the external hdd before booting up with my Ghost CD.  :-[

But I sure am glad it still works without tweaking in any way!  And the new hdd's work just fine in my laptop!  ;D

Rad, I think you need a "senior moment" smiley  ::)

there have been problems with that drop-down menu, accessing items.

i used to live in idaho falls (for ~9 months). beautiful country. cold winters.

what's a 'senior moment'?

@ Rad


Quote:

what's a 'senior moment'?

Really!?   :-?

@ roxe

I'm sorry you removed your prior post--it was an interesting troubleshooting dilemma.  I wasn't able to respond earlier in the day, but was mulling over the various questions I was going to ask to try and find a solution.

But, good to hear you found the solution!


Quote:

But I sure am glad it still works without tweaking in any way!

I'm very curious--the boot files you posted, in the post that is now gone, for your bootable CD were standard DOS boot files--there were no DOS drivers that would allow Ghost 2003 build .793 to access an external USB HDD on it's own!

So, I have to conclude that the laptop's BIOS is mounting the USB HDD in DOS for you and allowing DOS to assign drive letters--was the external USB HDD assigned a DOS drive letter?  Or, is the external HDD partitioned NTFS and the HDD could only be seen in the DOS Ghost interface--not in regular DOS--i.e. you could not, at the DOS prompt, change to the external USB HDD?

There have been some posts that seem to indicate that a certain number of BIOSs do support USB HDDs in DOS--but, it's never been quite clear what or how it's happening--I have never seen a system that does in person.  Most of the time, the BIOS support is non-existent.  And if you use a DOS boot driver that creates the ability to access an external USB HDD, then the BIOS support usually *conflicts* with the DOS driver and the boot process crashes and freezes--you have to disable the BIOS USB support function.

One little addition..... on the topic of that drop down menu....

I once had the problem where my mouse could not let me navigate to the bottom of the list of possible backup drives.
I would click the little scroll bar, with my mouse, but nothing would happen.
I finally found that if I used the 'Down Arrow' key on my keyboard, I could get to the bottom of the drive list.
I never figured out any answer to that problem, but using the down-arrow key allowed me to finish my backup.

In spite of some glitches, I still prefer to use Ghost 2003 wherever I can. (always, run from a DOS boot disk)

Happy Thanksgiving!

OC