After reading stories on the net regarding installation problems when installing Ghost10, I decided to try using the Symantec Recovery Environment on the install CD to create an image of my hard drive.  After plugging in my Iomega 160GB USB2.0 external hard drive, I restarted the computer and booted from the CD to the Recovery Environment.  It took approximately 4 minutes.  Once there, I selected Restore Ghost Legacy Image, which brought up Ghost8.2.  I then clicked Local-Disc-To Image and proceeded to backup my entire C: drive to the external drive.  The image was created successfully and passed the Integrity check.  Next, I proceeded to attempt a Restore of the just created image.  This was done up until the final step of an actual Restore. Everything seemed fine.  Of course, the acid test will be an actual Restore of the image file.  I am interested in any comments regarding the viability of this procedure for creating and restoring image files.  My system is a Dell Dimension 8400 with P4 3.0ghz with 1GB of ram and a 160GB SATA hard drive running XP Home.  Thanks for a very informative forum!

Grizzly

Quote:

That's extremely interesting!  On my Ghost 9.x installation CD, when booted to the *Recovery Environment*, the above mentioned copy of Ghost 8.2 is also present--but all functions except *Restore* and *Integrity Check* are crippled (*disabled*)--so no image creation is allowed or possible!

Notice that the above *quoted* function says only *Restore*!

Very interesting if Symantec did not cripple Ghost 8.2 on the Ghost 10.x installation CD!

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Based on your description of what you have done--sounds *very* viable!!!!

Any other Ghost 10'ers--can you verify the ability to create Ghost 8.2 backup images?!!!!

We crossed over. See above.

NightOwl,

I successfully restored the image with Ghost 8.2 after adding a few text files to that partition so I could see that the restored partition was different.

[Rad comment]:  

Brian

Did you see this in Pleonasm's last post:

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Yikes!!!!!  Can the Ghost 8.2 on the Ghost 10 CD be used to create a Bart PE using the Ghost 8.x plug in!!!!!

Here is where the *crippled* Ghost 8.2 is on the Ghost 9.x Recovery CD:

X:\I386\START\ADVANCED\EN\

RESTOREGHOST.EXE

Where is it on the Ghost 10 CD?

Grizzly,

This is really a great find.  

NightOwl, Brian, Pleo, and others -- there was one question some time ago about whether or not a NTFS external USB2 hard drive contains the drive letter in the DiskID signature:

Erase DiskID on external USB drive

I don't think the question was ever answered.  But from I saw in my testing today, I would say YES.  I booted from the Ghost 10 RE CD, and invoked Ghost 8.2 which is essentially the Windows version of Ghost, as I understand it.  

I checked the Ghost 8.2 option to recover and opened the window to look for .GHO images.  All my local drive letters (c, d, e, g) were present and my external usb drive (k) was also present.  Note, that f was not present because I no longer have an f partition; and g wasn't assigned f by default.

The Windows Pre-environment is loaded prior to Ghost 8.2.  My Windows XP Pro Registry is NOT loaded.  My opinion is that no drives are opened.

So the answer (in my opinion) is that DiskID, stored physically on the drive, contains a signature plus a drive letter.  Otherwise, how else would Windows PE or Ghost 8.2 know the correct one?

Grizzly, move to the head of the class.

Pleo,
John has answered the question re external HD's. Writing to DVD's is crippled but I'm sure restoring from DVD's would be OK.

NightOwl,
i386\Shell\Ghost contains restoreghost.exe and ghostexp.exe as well as other files. I extracted both files, renamed restoreghost.exe to ghost32.exe and put both in the Files folder of the BartPE plugin. I opened ghost.inf and deleted these lines
files\ghostsrv.exe=a,,3
files\ghostcdr.dll=a,,3
I then built a BartPE CD and the Ghost 8.2 plugin works fine and I created an image.
The practical value of this I'll leave to others.

We still need a BartPE plugin for Ghost 10 because Ghost 8.2 doesn't allow one to restore a Ghost 10 image stored on an external HD if that HD can't be seen from the RE.

Brian wrote on Mar 5^th, 2006 at 6:02pm:

I think that XP remembers (in the registry) all drive letters that it has ever used.  When I looked at mine, I saw several I hadn't used in ages.  In your
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
do you see drive letters for devices like usb card readers?

I don't know the full answer.  Maybe Dan will be able to comment.  I think method #2 is just to clear the drive letters in XP so the next time you boot, you take what's available.  For example, in my case, I think if I cleared the key and data values, my cdrom would not show up as r: at the next boot, which is what I have had it for ages.

I don't think that WinPE is loading the hives or registry of XP.  How could it know?  Suppose you had multiple boot partitions?  Which registry would WinPE load?

I've tried several times searching for information about the format and contents of DiskID.  Google and Microsoft searching and I can't find anything.  

(I'll gladly move to the back of the class if someone can find it!    )