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How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x? (Read 30116 times)
M0zbius
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How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Jul 25th, 2008 at 5:24pm
 
Hi,

I'm looking for the correct way to create unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x for my laptop which doesn't have a floppy drive. Can anybody help?
 
 
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TheShadow
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #1 - Jul 26th, 2008 at 11:51am
 
First, do what's asked.....and tell us all about your laptop.
Make, Model, OS?

There are dozens of things that you really can't do with a laptop or even a desktop, without a floppy drive.
That's why I encourage anyone wanting to do things like you do, to go out and buy yourself a USB Floppy Drive.
Most laptops will accept this little drive as drive A: and that makes using programs like Ghost a million times easier.

Ghost will typically ONLY put itself on a DVD making it bootable if it's run from A:.
Ghost still boots up to Ghost and you have to tell it what you want it to do. 

Good Luck,
Shadow  Cool
 
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ben_mott
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #2 - Jul 27th, 2008 at 11:06am
 
Hello again,

here is an old and very long thread about bootable CDs it has been
partly hacked from bootable Cds from OEM manufacturers of XP and win98 such as Advent and IBM etc  I do not know whether it works with Vista.
the thread is too long and by the time you Finnish you probably have fallen sleep on the computer.
it has all ready made floppies and all ready to go
so if you are a PC or laptop OEM XP manufacturer you be up and running in few hours. giving customers recovery Cds or telling them to press F10 to recover from hidden ghost partition.
if you got hidden partition already do not use partition magic/Qtparted  or any other partitioning tool to resize the partition please.it will Knaker your recovery Cd or partitions.

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14127&st=0

regards Ben
Smiley
 
 
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K Singh
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #3 - Jul 28th, 2008 at 1:59pm
 
M0zbius wrote on Jul 25th, 2008 at 5:24pm:
correct way to create unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD


Check out the guide i wrote
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1211223513

available at
http://www.esnips.com/web/kaviteshsingh/.

You need not have any floopy drive for making a bootable disc.

I have mentioned how to get win98SE disc image and create a bootable disc using it.

Add ghost.exe in the CD/DVD along with the backup created in CD/DVD.

To automate you need to edit the autoexec.bat file in the bootable image to load the ghost.exe automatically.
Once that is done you can select the restore image to restore to partition. If you further want to automate the process of recovery using ghost, you can use the command-line options.
I have provided a way to restore an image using command option in the guide.

The guide i for creating a recovery partition on the harddisk just like lenovo, dell give for new pc. But it will solve ur purpose of creating bootable disc also.

I would suggest try everything first in virtual machine like virtualBox before you actually get your hands dirty on real system.

Hope this help.
 
 
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M0zbius
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #4 - Aug 9th, 2008 at 2:53pm
 
Thanks to all your replies. Thanks KSingh for the precise infos I'll definitely give this a go. By the way TheShadow my laptop is an Inspiron 5160 equipped with XP with NTFS partition.
 
 
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M0zbius
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #5 - Aug 19th, 2008 at 12:32am
 

Ok, I got everything setup but I have some problems getting the automatic ghost to get going (restoring the ghost image from the CD the harddisk in the laptop)...

Can somebody tell me what's wrong with the following command? :

ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=x:\CDR00001.GHO,dst=1 -sure -szel >null

Whenever I boot the cd and get to have that ghost command executed I get a "General failure writing drive A". I thought that maybe the problem was that dst=1 equaled to the A: drive so changed it to "dst=2" but it appears that it hasn't change a thing.

 
 
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K Singh
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #6 - Aug 19th, 2008 at 4:28am
 
M0zbius wrote on Aug 19th, 2008 at 12:32am:
Can somebody tell me what's wrong with the following command? :

ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=x:CDR00001.GHO,dst=1 -sure -szel >null



in my guide i was using
ghost.exe -clone,mode=prestore,src=1:4\CImage.gho:1,dst=1:1 -sure>null

i didnt understand szel command. Maybe i will check the manual again.

The probable cause of this maybe that your destination for writing might not be right.

I am assuming you imaging C drive (probably) and then trying to restore it using the cd.

And in the command line how are you defining X drive. Incase you using win98 bootable image. Keep this in mind.
In the config.sys you will see what is the drive letter assigned to your CD-drive.
Now lets say its is given letter X:. Now win98se creates a ramdisk which will get assigned Y: drive. the actual data of the CD drive can be accessed via Z: drive.

So i think there maybe a good possibility that you not providing the correct drive letter where the image is stored.

Also keep in mind these (thanks to Nigel for mentioning it):-
1. Incase you writing the images to a DVD write it in ISO9660 and not UDF mode
2. Keep the naming of the image files as 8:3 format. Try not to rename it.
You can check more info on this in this post
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1217615165/18#18

Coming back to point, i think first ensure that ghost is able to find the images on CD-rom by giving correct command line options.
Secondly try dst=1:1 instead of just dst=1. The second 1 denotes the partition which you want to restore.
 
 
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M0zbius
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #7 - Aug 19th, 2008 at 9:08pm
 
Hi K Singh (by the way your guide is top notch),

here some more info that should shed some light on my situation...

my config.sys is setup as such...:

Code:
device=oakcdrom.sys /d:ksingh
lastdrive=z


my autoexec.bat is setup as such...:

Code:

path=a:\;x:\
mouse.com
mscdex.exe /d:ksingh /l:x /m:16 /v
ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=x:\CDR00001.GHO,dst=1 -sure -szel >null


Now I did some research to adapt your guide's ghost command to my need which is:

To restore a hard disk (not only a partition) image from a CD that's is specified as x: (as previously seen). The reason behind this full disk restore is to make sure that the special BOOT partition (which contains the software to access the BIOS setup on that funky laptop) is restored as well as the OS partition.

Now as for the command adaptation I referred myself to the following pages:
Alphabetical list of switches
and
Cloning (which completes previous link)

As you can see:

It appears that "prestore" mode is really for partition restore which doesn't match my need which is to restore a disk therefore I use "load" mode instead.

Also contrarily to "prestore", "load" doesn't use the "disk#:partition#" format which is used for partition restore. Instead it only requires a disk number which explains the "dst=1".

The "-sure" switch is really to avoid prompts that could appear while using the "-clone" switch.

The "-szel" switch is used so that the ghost CD can be hard disk size independent by having the last partition to be resized automatically (in case that the ghost is used because the hard disk had to be changed because it broke down).

======================

Now.... My  understanding is that DST values only refers to hard disks and not removable drives (floppy, CD....). But now I'm not quite sure about it anymore... (because of the error message that I get).

NOTE: The cd use Nero's ISO(BOOT)  settings so I can't really go wrong there. Also I may have forgotten to give some crucial details but the other config.sys and autoexec.bat lines do get executed properly and the error message gives 3 options Abort, Retry, Cancel (or Ignore I'd need to double check). The format is Joliet.  I'll check to see if a possible DOS filename limits transgression is the cluprit... (But then again I kind of doubt it since ghost.exe and CDR00001.GHO filename respect DOS limitations).

I start to wonder if my problem has anything to do with what can be read at Norton Ghost 2003 Readme.txt in the "Booting from a CD/DVD" paragraph.


Thanks for the help.
 
 
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M0zbius
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #8 - Aug 19th, 2008 at 10:54pm
 
Ok I believe that I've found the culprit....

">NULL"

for some odd reason redirecting to NULL results in having something to be written on disk which I don't understand since NULL is supposed to be nothing.

Anyway I gave my command a go without the redirection and now it works stellar!

Just for future references for other noobs I've searched around and found on Radified a complementary guide for bootable cd/dvd (without floppy drives) at Nightowl's Roost

Thanks for the help!
 
 
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K Singh
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #9 - Aug 20th, 2008 at 11:23am
 
M0zbius wrote on Aug 19th, 2008 at 9:08pm:
Hi K Singh (by the way your guide is top notch),

Thanks a lot. Since i spent days and nights making things right, i thought its worth sharing will all Smiley Smiley

M0zbius wrote on Aug 19th, 2008 at 9:08pm:
Code:

device=oakcdrom.sys /d:ksingh
lastdrive=z



my autoexec.bat is setup as such...:

Code:

path=a:\;x:\
mouse.com
mscdex.exe /d:ksingh /l:x /m:16 /v
ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=x:\CDR00001.GHO,dst=1 -sure -szel >null


Well i am hoping my name gets into your recovery disc. i see you have modified quite a lot of the config.sys.

Few things i would like to mention. I feel if you have time and patience to test it, it might make a wonderful recovery disc.

1. I download the bootable win98se image from www.bootdisk.com
2. extract the image using winrar (mentioned in my guide)
3. Now use Winimage to extract the autoexec.bat from that image. You can download the trial version which can be used 30 times(i guess- its shows remaining uses left at start up)

4. Now in the line 30 of autoexec.bat remove the %CDROM% and put it lets say K.

What this will do is irrespective of the number of drives and FAT partitions the cd-rom will be assigned letter K.

This will be very useful when you automate the whole process of restoring using command line. You would know before hand the images lie in K drive designated to CD_ROM.

M0zbius wrote on Aug 19th, 2008 at 9:08pm:
mscdex.exe /d:ksingh /l:x /m:16 /v  

I see that you are already doing it by designating it to x drive. Which is anyways cool Smiley Smiley

For the command lines i appreciate the information provided. It has been long time i opened the manual again for reference. But the information will come handy when i make one for me.

Just one more suggestion

create a batch file from where you start the recovery/restore process. I mean dont add the command line of ghost in autoexec.bat.
No logical reason why you shouldnt do it.
But i create a batch file names restore.bat and invoke it from autoexec.bat.

The content of the batch file i have given for reference.
Code:

@echo off
cls




echo.
echo ******************************************************
echo.
echo                 SYSTEM RESTORE WIZARD
echo.
echo ******************************************************
echo.
echo -----------------------WARNING------------------------
echo.
echo  All data in the C: drive will be erased
echo.
echo  and restored to original state.
echo.
echo  System will restart after the recovery process.
echo.
echo ------------------------------------------------------
echo.
echo  Press Ctrl+C to abort the operation
echo.
echo               else
echo.
pause

cls

echo.
echo Initializing....................

Ghost.exe -clone,mode=prestore,src=1:3\CImage.gho:1,dst=1:1 -sure>null

cls

restart.com



Now what this does it, it prompts user one warning before it wipes and restores. Kinda look nice to me Tongue
 
 
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TheShadow
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #10 - Aug 22nd, 2008 at 11:34am
 
"Unable to write to A:"......that means, that Ghost wants to be booted from A: where it can write to it's ERROR LOG if something isn't right.
When Ghost is started from some media that it can't write to, like a CD, then the program stops with the error message that it can't write to A:.

I've run into this limitation several times myself.

The only solution is to "Don't make errors!" in your programming and Ghost won't have to use its Error Log.

Ghost is so easy to use, that I don't see the advantage to trying to make it run automatically. Wink

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  Cool
 
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #11 - Aug 28th, 2008 at 2:43am
 
Thanks K Singh but I thought about adding the same kind of warning message in the final version of my batch file Wink (better be safe than sorry!). By the way you could have used Ghost internal reboot switch (I believe it's -rb) instead of a third party executable file! Tongue


TheShadow when you have to fix PCs for people who only know how to chat and install adware on their system until they break and show unbearable slowness (pretty much every 5-6 months)... Such disc is therefore very usefull! Just pop the cd, sit, relax and wait! Wink

 
 
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #12 - Aug 28th, 2008 at 9:30am
 
Point well taken.....

But, I'd rather they call me instead.
Doing a restore of a months old backup just deletes SO MANY things that the person may not want to loose.
I'd rather try to FIX the computer and save the users STUFF.

Just my own preference.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  Cool
 
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K Singh
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #13 - Aug 28th, 2008 at 10:23am
 
M0zbius wrote on Aug 28th, 2008 at 2:43am:
Thanks K Singh but I thought about adding the same kind of warning message in the final version of my batch file Wink (better be safe than sorry!). By the way you could have used Ghost internal reboot switch (I believe it's -rb) instead of a third party executable file! Tongue

Well yes we can use that switch also. You know it brings back to my guide of creating one step recovery guide. It was the time i was fiddling around with dos and all to make things work. So at times i needed to restart so instead of doing a manual restart by pressing the power button i opted for a separate command.
The reboot file is actually taken from the win98se if i remember correctly.

Also lets say in my restore.bat you decide not to continue and press Ctrl+C. It will take you back to the DOS prompt and you write reboot and you can restart.

Sound it may funny or lazy but i try to automate as much as possible. Smiley

I will be starting a thread and providing a bootable image for the CD/DVD which would match your requirement. It will initiate a batch file which one will be free to use/modify and execute ghost. It can be treated as very simple strip down version of nightowl bootable cd with bare minimums.

Hopefully it shall be available by this weekend if i dont get too drunk on weekend Grin

TheShadow wrote on Aug 28th, 2008 at 9:30am:
But, I'd rather they call me instead.
Doing a restore of a months old backup just deletes SO MANY things that the person may not want to loose.
I'd rather try to FIX the computer and save the users STUFF.


Well it actually depends on the type of recovery you want. For me i keep the bare minimum in the C drive. I mean no personal stuff. Just the programs and all the other installations etc which windows require. For my music/documents etc i prefer some other partition.

So i have my one step recovery which reverts back the windows whenever needed. Just before the recovery i try to copy my bookmarks which gets stored in C drive. Though via some tweak i can make them also move to some other partition.

I think Ghost suite is not meant for daily backup or something like this. The norton ghost (which is  Angry) have some incremental backup feature for daily or scheduled backup.
In case if that is the kind of requirement i feel Acronis should the first choice. Brilliant software and not at all heavy on the system like Norton.

Norton make a dual core machine like a PIII Embarrassed

The last Norton product i used was Norton Internet Security 2003 OEM which i got with my Intel 850 motherboard. And i see no change with the current 2008 in terms of resource utilization.

 
 
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Re: How to create an unattended Ghost restore CD/DVD with Ghost 8.x?
Reply #14 - Sep 13th, 2008 at 10:50pm
 
TheShadow wrote on Aug 28th, 2008 at 9:30am:
Point well taken.....

But, I'd rather they call me instead.
Doing a restore of a months old backup just deletes SO MANY things that the person may not want to loose.
I'd rather try to FIX the computer and save the users STUFF.

Just my own preference.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  Cool



You gotta a point! I've created a newer ghost but this time it will restore only partition1 (special BIOS setup partition) and partition2 (the OS) and leave alone partition3 (which contains the Documents and setting folder through the use of NTFS Junction!  Smiley ) Now that's hard to beat! lol! No more cleaning of insane POPUPs and the computer is good as new almost better than some Windows repair and you get to keep your documents! Obviously some application that were not in the original ghost are to be reinstalled but that's alot less painfull than trying to get rid of a pesky trojan/spyware/adware Smiley
 
 
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