Radified Community Forums - Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors

Ecoli

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Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Dec 13^th, 2007 at 7:24am

Hi,

I hope you guys at this forum can help me out on this one. I have tried Symantec support but they proved to be, well, to be honest, absolutely useless.

Here's the problem summary:

I have created a bootable USB stick of vendor A using Ghost 11
I have created an image of that USB stick using Ghost 11
I have put that image on a different USB stick of vendor A and succeeded to boot a PC with it
I have put that image on a different USB stick of vendor B and failed to boot a PC with it

Obviously, I wish to have a Ghost 11 image I can put on a USB stick without vendor-specific restrictions. Does anyone here have an explanation for the undesired behavior described in the problem summary above? Or even better, does anyone here have a solution? Is there anything special to Ghost 11 I am overlooking which may cause this undesired behavior?

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NightOwl

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #1 - Dec 13^th, 2007 at 9:29am

Ecoli

Quote:

I wish to have a Ghost 11 image I can put on a USB stick without vendor-specific restrictions.

I have no personal experience with bootable USB memory sticks--but I have used several brands of USB sticks--and my experience is that not all brands are *equal*--so your Ghost image may not be brand specific--but the USB stick may or may not work equally well--I'd try other brands and size USB sticks to determine where the problem might lie.

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Ecoli

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #2 - Dec 13^th, 2007 at 9:55am

Thanks for the reply. I'll narrow down my problem to just 1 core question:
Can I, using Ghost 11, create an image of a bootable USB stick that I will be able to put on any equally sized USB stick regardless of its vendor?

I can put the image I currently have of a bootable USB stick on any other USB stick using Ghost 11. Memory size is no big problem, but booting from sticks of certain other vendors just won't succeed (though once in Windows, they seem to operate just fine). I'm looking for an image I can put on any USB stick, using Ghost 11, to create a bootable USB stick, regardless of its vendor.

Sidenote, I am very curious as to what is causing USB sticks of some vendors not to boot with the image and others to boot just fine.

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NightOwl

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #3 - Dec 13^th, 2007 at 10:30am

Ecoli

Quote:

Sidenote, I am very curious as to what is causing USB sticks of some vendors not to boot with the image and others to boot just fine.

Yes--that answer would probably help--what exactly makes a USB memory stick bootable?! If you know that--then you might know what you need Ghost to do to transfer that ability successfully!

As an experiment--I would try using the *-ib* (Image Boot) switch when creating the image file of the bootable USB stick--now the entire boot region (sectors 0 thru 62) is copied, and not just the default sector 0. Make sure you are using the *whole disk* and not a *partition* restore.

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Ecoli

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #4 - Dec 14^th, 2007 at 2:43am

Thanks! For pointing me in the direction of the Ghost parameters

I'll have a try with some different Ghost parameters and see what happens, so far I've identified the following parameters for testing:
-ib (clone entire boot track too)
-id (clone entire disk)
-fdsp (preserve disk signature bytes)
-nooslayout (no OS update of disk layout)

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Ecoli

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #5 - Dec 14^th, 2007 at 10:13am

OK, here are some test results, but I am still desperately in need of explanations...

1 created bootable USB stick of vendor A using Ghost 11, capacity according to Ghost = 1920Mb
2 created image of bootable USB stick of vendor A using Ghost 11
3 put image on different USB stick of vendor A, succeeded booting using this stick
4 put image on different USB stick of vendor B, failed booting using this stick, but stick is still usable as USB stick when in Windows
5 created image of bootable USB stick of vendor A using Ghost 11 and parameter -ib (copies whole boot track, sectors 0-62, iso default only bootsector 0)
6 put image on different USB stick of vendor A, succeeded booting using this stick
7 put image on different USB stick of vendor B, now succeeded booting using this stick

1 created bootable USB stick of vendor B using Ghost 11, capacity according to Ghost = 1930Mb
2 created image of bootable USB stick of vendor B using Ghost 11
3 put image on different USB stick of vendor B, succeeded booting using this stick
4 put image on different USB stick of vendor A, succeeded booting using this stick
5 created image of bootable USB stick of vendor B using Ghost 11 and parameter -ib (copies whole boot track, sectors 0-62, iso default only bootsector 0)
6 put image on different USB stick of vendor B, succeeded booting using this stick
7 put image on different USB stick of vendor A, also succeeded booting using this stick

Apparently some things work and some don't.. why??? Disk capacity?? Disk vendor?? Disk boot track??

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nbree

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #6 - Dec 15^th, 2007 at 4:39am

Yes, it's the boot track. The entire point of having the USB support in the Ghost Boot Wizard is to put on a custom MBR (written here at Ghost HQ) which deals with the fact that some manufacturers of system BIOSes do inconsistent things with bootable memory sticks.

Internally, USB mass storage devices use the SCSI command set over the serial bus, so they are just bags of sectors. However, when booting off them the BIOSes have to present the device as a classic disk with cylinders and heads, so they have to fake up a disk geometry.

Now, most BIOSes do the same thing as LBA-mode hard disks do; poorly designed BIOSes don't, and come up with something else (typically one of the fake "large" mode geometries that decent BIOS vendors abandoned as the default in the early 90s in favour of LBA).

If the geometry assigned by the BIOS doesn't match the geometry the disk was formatted with (which will be LBA-mode in Windows, always) then the result is unreadable and it won't boot.

So, to deal with this we write out own custom MBR that uses a different BIOS interface (extended INT 13H) which does LBA-mode disk access and emulates the classic INT13h interface through that, so we can always present an LBA-style geometry to the OS that boots off the disk.

Using the Boot Wizard to format the disk puts this special MBR on the stick and after that it's good to boot. Cloning with -ib will preserve that custom MBR and so it'll boot as well.

edit: spelling and grammar tidyup, sucks to post when tired.

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Ecoli

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #7 - Dec 17^th, 2007 at 6:28am

Thanks for the excellent feedback!
Your reply helped me understand the big picture and root cause of the issue.
It did take me a while to fully understand what you were saying here though!
That's probably because I'm usually not much involved with these kind of issues.
But this site is in my favorites now, I'll probably be here more often from now on

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nbree

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #8 - Dec 17^th, 2007 at 1:26pm

Something I didn't explain is why Windows always formats the disk assuming an LBA-type layout.

That's because the Windows driver stacks for USB devices will end up treating any USB mass storage device effectively as a SCSI disk, since the command set for USB mass storage is a tunneling of SCSI commands. SCSI has always used linear block addresses, so to Windows it's always like that.

It's only under the BIOS emulation used to actually boot off the device that problems can occur, and it's not possible to tell ahead of time what kind of geometry any given BIOS will assign, so we always use our workaround code "just in case".

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Ecoli

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Re: Ghost 11 and USB sticks of different vendors
Reply #9 - Dec 18^th, 2007 at 2:36am

Thanks for another very useful bit of information

Also, I think I should add I only used 2 USB sticks in my test earlier, so the outcome presented in the second test scenario may have been influenced by the first test scenario. For example, the entire boot track had already been properly cloned earlier, so not using the -ib switch in the second test scenario may have shown up to work whereas it probably wouldn't have worked if the test had been conducted properly (that is to say, with new USB sticks).

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