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A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More! (Read 643317 times)
spooky
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #195 - Mar 31st, 2006 at 8:06am
 
Hi altogether!

Awesome stuff I found in this thread! Thank you for all the useful information. But :-) I have a question:

I have created a NightOwl USB boot floppy for my USB2.0 300gig Samsung HD300LD hard disk. WinXP recognized it and I formatted the drive (only one partition, about 287gig of user space using the NTFS).

When booting from the NightOwl floppy the Panasonic drivers recognize the hard disk drive and I can start imaging.

But as soon as the HD gets filled over a certain limit - I don't know where this limit is - ghost2003 doesn't play nicely with the disk anymore! It crashes before even displaying it (C) screen.

I then removed some thirtyodd gigs in WinXP and lo and behold ghost could work with the disk again.

How big are the hard drives or partitions you can successfully access and use with the Nightowl disk? Are there any known restrictions?

Thanks for any help!

Regards
   spoooooky :-)
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #196 - Mar 31st, 2006 at 8:37am
 
spooky

I do not know of any Ghost limitation on HDD or partition sizes--if the system (hardware and software) can mount and see the whole HDD--Ghost seems to handle it too.

How old is your basic system? 

Is your BIOS up to date?

Using Ghost in DOS means your basic motherboard and USB controllers need to support large HDD's in DOS vs what WinXP may be able to do--which could be different--so check to see if your system specifications include that large a HDD support.

You could try breaking the HDD into smaller partitions to see if that works as a *work-around*.

You could try hooking it up to another system to see if you can save images past the current GB limit you are having--how many GB's will your USB HDD hold before you start having the behavior problems?
 

No question is stupid...but, possibly the answers are  Wink !
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #197 - Mar 31st, 2006 at 11:03am
 
Hi!

Thanks for your quick reply. The HD is 300gig of which I have 287gig after formatting it with NTFS under winXP.

I had around 180gig of files (mainly not images but normal documents and such) on it when Ghost2003 did not respond anymore. The "active" LED on the HD wouldn't go out. I then removed (again under XP) around 120gigs leaving 18gigs or so. Ghost could deal with it. To really make sure that this is causing the problem I again put around 130gig onto it. Again Ghost03 couldn't work with the HD.

I am using the Panasonic drivers version 2.20.
My system is an Asus A8V deluxe with an Athlon64-3200.
I don't know about the BIOS yet...

In this thread I read about someone using a roughly 300gig disk split up into 2 partitions each around 143gig without any problem.

I havn't really tracked down the exact amount of data I can put onto the disk before Ghost or the drivers or ... start to behave awkwardly as this involves booting up again and again... I was hoping that such strange behaviour has already been observed or even solved... :-)

Well, I'll check the BIOS version thingy...

Thanks so far... If you have any further ideas: very much appreciated :-) I also have Ghost 10 but I'd rather use ghost2003 if somehow possible......

Regards
   spooooky :-)
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #198 - Mar 31st, 2006 at 12:59pm
 
spooky

I would still suggest trying the option of creating two smaller sized partitions to see if that *solves* the problem--if yes, then you are probably dealing with an issue of your system--for whatever reason?--not handling that large a partition in DOS.

If you want to do testing to see what the max partition size is--use a 50/50 split first, then a 75/25 second, if it chokes with the 75 % partition when it approaches that 180 GB load--the cut the additional 25 % that was added to make the 75 % in half--so now a 62.5/37.5 split, etc. until you determine the critical size--it's probably around that 180 GB based on what you have observed so far.
 

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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #199 - Apr 1st, 2006 at 3:52am
 
Hi Nightowl!

I went to the Asus website and checked the BIOS updates for my A8V-Deluxe board. My version was 1010, they had 1018.001 for download (there have been numerous updates till now). So I reluctantly decided to update the board's BIOS although their changelogs did not promise anything that would help me. But, guess what! Now it works like a charme!

Gosh, that's 100 times better than fiddling around with Ghost 9 or even 10. Ghost 2003 is so compact and independent of any installed software. Great!

Now I can go about creating that stuff on a bootable CD.

Thanks for your feedback.

spooooky :-)
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #200 - Apr 1st, 2006 at 8:20am
 
spooky

Thanks for the report back--glad it wasn't too big a problem to resolve.
 

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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #201 - Apr 10th, 2006 at 2:53pm
 
Hello, I have been reading  this thread for a while now and I have learned a lot form it. I am a system admin for the army. I have a very large number of Dell GX-280. In the bios it allows you to boot to a USB device. I have a question thats pretty wild. I can use a USB external HD to clone the internal drive. Take the external HD and clone another system. Everything will work fine but, if I make an image (backup) of that system onto that external HD then take it to another system. The new system will lock up while trying to boot to the standard ghost boot disk. Which is the same boot disk used before to dump the clone image. I guess my question to you is how could it work for a disk to disk clone and not for a disk from image using the same boot disk and external HD.

I have not tried the panasonic boot disk because the stardard boot disk works fine with the clone. Can you give any insight to this? Thanks.
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #202 - Apr 10th, 2006 at 6:34pm
 
Kroggg

Not sure I'm following the sequence correctly:

Quote:
In the bios it allows you to boot to a USB device.

You say *boot to*--you mean you have *access* to the USB device--or do you mean you are *booting from* the USB device?

Then you say this:

Quote:
The new system will lock up while trying to boot to the standard ghost boot disk. Which is the same boot disk used before to dump the clone image.

So, you are booting from the same floppy disk--standard Ghost boot disk--but, the boot process hangs if your USB HDD has a Ghost image file on it, and is not a clone of another HDD from another system.

So, if I have followed this correctly--you are not actually using a USB DOS driver from the boot floppy--but depending on native access provided by the BIOS--correct?

And if the USB HDD is a clone of another HDD--all is well--it boots from the floppy fine and there is access and cloning back to the internal HDD can be done.

But if the USB HDD has simply a file on it--a Ghost image file--then you can not even boot from the floppy to the Ghost interface--correct?

I assume, if the USB HDD is not connected, that the Std Ghost Boot floppy allows successful booting--correct?

I can not think of anything that would cause that behavior--but with Ghost (by the way--what version?) and USB, I suppose anything is possible!

You must be booting to Ghost and saving that Ghost image to the USB HDD--so the USB HDD must have a file system--FAT or NTFS?  Have you tried the other file system it's not to see if that makes a difference?

You could *disable* the BIOS access routine for USB, and then use the Panasonic DOS USB drivers to see if that works around the issue.

 

No question is stupid...but, possibly the answers are  Wink !
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #203 - Apr 11th, 2006 at 3:02pm
 
Hi Nightowl!

I did it :-) I created my bootable CD Rom including Ghost + Panasonic USB drivers + CDRom drivers.

I followed your instructions in your project#1 guide and modified it to include the following files in the image:

AUTOEXEC.BAT
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
di1000dd.sys
HIMEM.SYS
IO.SYS
mouse.com
MOUSE.INI
MSCDEX.EXE
MSDOS.SYS
OAKCDROM.SYS
Usbaspi.sys

My Config.Sys file:

Device=himem.sys
device=oakcdrom.sys /d:cd01
Device=usbaspi.sys /e /v
Device=di1000dd.sys
Dos=high,umb
lastdrive=z

My Autoexec.bat file:

@echo off
path=a:\;x:\
mouse.com
mscdex.exe /d:cd01 /l:x /m:16 /v

I burnt it using Nero and it works just great!
I don't have problems with the size of the image because I just put the ghost.exe file on the data part of the CD. So I have to access it on X:. But that's of course not a problem.

The only thing that doesn't work (and did not work on my bootable floppy as well) is, that my USB drive doesn't get assigned a drive letter. Can you tell me how to achieve that?

Thanks for your inspiration, guides and help!

spoooooky :-)
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #204 - Apr 11th, 2006 at 3:34pm
 
spooky

Hmmmm...not sure how it can be *working great* if you are not getting a drive letter assigned to your USB HDD!

*Usbaspi.sys* should *mount* the USB HDD, and *di1000dd.sys* should *assign* a drive letter!

If, during boot and your CD is first being accessed to begin reading the boot files, press F8--choose *Step-by-Step Confirmation* of loading each file line of the boot files one at a time, and watch the results--after loading *di1000dd.sys*--no drive letter assignment it listed?

In Ghost, do you have access to the USB HDD?
 

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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #205 - Apr 12th, 2006 at 6:38am
 
Nightowl

Well, The drive is not assigned a letter in DOS by di1000dd.sys so I can't use it under plain DOS. But Ghost 2003 sees the drive and assigns it a [x:y]+label name. The drive is a 300gig Samsung HDD, one partition, ntfs. Could this be the cause for it not getting a drive letter assigned, because of NTFS? The built-in HDD is a 200gig, 3 partitons drive, first two partitions NTFS, the third FAT32. And only the FAT32 partition is assigned a drive letter. ... As long as Ghost can work with all these partitions, it's not a big problem. But how can I - if possible - assign drive letters to NTFS-formatted partitions?

I don't have the output of the drivers at hand. I'll post it later this day.

Regards
     spoooooky Smiley
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #206 - Apr 12th, 2006 at 8:39am
 
spooky

Quote:
The drive is a 300gig Samsung HDD, one partition, ntfs. Could this be the cause for it not getting a drive letter assigned, because of NTFS?


Aaarrrggg....wasn't using my *thinking cap*--DOS will not *see* any NTFS partitions--and therefore will not be able to assign a drive letter.

But once you launch Ghost, NTFS partitions are identified by a *disk#:partition#*--and Ghost will work just fine with those parititions.

Quote:
But how can I - if possible - assign drive letters to NTFS-formatted partitions?

Can't, as far as I know!
 

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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #207 - Apr 12th, 2006 at 9:40am
 
NightOwl and Spooky, the free utility NTFSDOS may be used to assign drive letter designations to NTFS partitions (for read-only access) in DOS.

Please post the insights you learn from using NTFSDOS.
 

ple • o • nasm n. “The use of more words than are required to express an idea”
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #208 - Apr 12th, 2006 at 10:22am
 
Nightowl and Pleonasm

Allrighty, then I can lean back again :-)

It's not that essential for me to have those drive letters as long as Ghost can see them and read write to/from them. As long as I can recognize which partition is which, everything's fine.

Cu!
   spoooooky :-)
 
 
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Re: A Better USB 2.0 DOS Driver for Ghost + More!
Reply #209 - Apr 12th, 2006 at 7:00pm
 
Just need to add the following.  Use the /w on the USBASPI.SYS.  Make sure the drive is off when you start up the computer and wait until you get prompted with the /w swich to turn on the drive then swith it on and continue the process.  This small detail stopped this wonderfull USB driver from working in Ghost causing Ghost to crash with an 36000 inconsitency error.

Took me 10 hours to work that out !

GX270 using FIreDock USB 2.0

Also Himem.sys  didn't load as Dell aparently had one already loaded.
 
 
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