Using Ghost 2003 for quite some time through on-the-fly CD/DVD images, I decided recently to have another look at the compatibility issue between Ghost and external USB2.0 hard disks. When I originally tested this capability 2 years ago that I bought the thing, I was completely disappointed by the embedded drivers. They would not work!! Taking into account that availability in local stores of external disk enclosures is limited to some models ex-Taiwan (of rather obscure manufacturing...), I did not hope to achieve very much. Stumbling on a nice post on the "Motto Hairu" & Panasonic USB drivers:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1095438251

I decided to give it a try and was delighted to find out that it works!!! The only glitch I had was that the first time I connected the disk through an external hub...BAD idea!! The disk, partitioned in four was not 100% usable. Only the first partition was allocated a drive letter. Connecting directly on the PC solved this...
To give some details on the hardware...the enclosure manufacturer is called "Vipower" (the chipset is unknown...) and the HDD is a 2.5" SeaGate ST9100824A (100GB).

After testing a bootable diskette with these drivers, I was able to complete remastering my original Ghost 2003 retail CD. Since it was an old "775" level disk, I added two folders with the offline "789" and "793" update patches with a script to automate the procedure. I also replaced the files that were in the "Support" folder with the newer ones (these are the files that are used when the CD acts as a bootable medium...), added IE6sp1 (to enable an easy install even on Win98SE running PCs) and Windows Installer 2.0 & 3.1. Final touch was to replace the CD bootable image with a new one, using Win98SE MS-DOS instead of PC-DOS and a complete set of drivers including the original Ghost drivers, SCSI drivers and naturally the Motto Hairu/Panasonic drivers - all menu selectable. I tested it and it works like a charm...

johnroberts wrote on Apr 4^th, 2007 at 5:06pm:

I doubt this will be the last time an external USB hub will cause grief for a Ghost user's external HDD

>Adaptec is well known for producing solid quality hware. It is no surprise that their hub works fine...

>IE6sp1 has nothing to do with DOS. It has to do with a very annoying installation failure message on Win98 (it has happened on several occasions...). The message complains about incorrect (obsolete) IE version...This is probably *.msi related...Anyway since the space Ghost 2003 occupies is a mere 110MB there is still plenty of space left even on a small 8cm disk to add more useful stuff. Plus that the 8cm CD-R is the same size as a floppy...and FAR more reliable

Greets

P.S. Rad, tks for moving to proper category...