Radified Community Forums - Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.

ericfree1

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Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Aug 4^th, 2008 at 7:20pm

I don't have any floppy drives.

It seems you need a floppy drive in order to make a boot disc.

I want to create ghost images of my drives. I would like to store them on an external hard drive.

How do I then make restores from these ghost images? Is there a way to make this work if my operating system completely dies? I want to be able to mount the external hard drive and restore the entire drive (with the operating system) from the ghost image. This seems like it should be easy enough, but I don't see how to do it from Ghost 2003. Or do I need a newer version of Ghost?

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Brian

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #1 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 7:49pm ericfree1, See.... http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html
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Nigel Bree

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #2 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 7:59pm From memory we made the retail Ghost 2003 CD's bootable as well (although some machines with defective BIOSes may not actually boot the DOS environment on those CD's successfully, the vast majority should).
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ericfree1

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #3 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:26pm I tried it. I booted successfully from the Norton Systemworks CD (which has Ghost on it). Only ghost.exe is not in the "boot drive"
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ericfree1

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #4 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:31pm Brian, In creating the boot CD. Will it be able to see (and restore) from a external USB hard drive?
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Nigel Bree

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #5 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:41pm ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:26pm: which has Ghost on it Unfortunately, we didn't master SystemWorks, that was done by a US product team we just supplied our bits to. The Ghost 2003 CDs are bootable and did have Ghost.exe in the boot package, why theirs didn't is a mystery.
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Brian

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #6 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:45pm ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 8:26pm: (which has Ghost on it) If you can see ghost.exe on the CD you should be able to navigate to it from DOS. Quote: Will it be able to see (and restore) from a external USB hard drive? I don't know.
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ericfree1

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Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Reply #7 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:07pm

Thanks for all the advice.

I'm just wondering if I've got the right idea:

I want to save ghost backups on external hard drives for easy storage. I want to be able to do restores of my C drive from these backups.

OK, I can try creating this boot CD (which is quite an involved process apparently), and it might be able to see the USB external hard drive.

Does anybody know offhand if there is another product (either a newer version of Ghost or one made by another company) that can do this for sure?

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Brian

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #8 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:13pm ericfree1, Can you find ghost.exe on your current CD?
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ericfree1

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Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Reply #9 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:29pm

No. It's not there in that format. I must be created from an install program.

All that loads with the Norton Systemworks is "Norton AntiVirus: Emergency Virus Repair". I cannot run ghost from it. It also cannot see any other drive except this "RAM drive" it loads. (I'm just guessing it's a RAM drive.)

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Brian

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #10 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:33pm No, I meant can you see ghost.exe on the CD from Windows. Do a search from Windows. If it's there you will be able to find it in DOS. If you find it in Windows, could you post the full path to ghost.exe.
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Nigel Bree

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Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Reply #11 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:35pm

The full corporate versions of Ghost have for years had a boot disk builder in them that can do bootable CD/DVD images, and genuine Ghost 8.x and forward had its own DOS USB drivers built in (plus in genuine Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 the boot disk builder can make Windows PE and Linux bootable CD's with 32-bit Ghost and the Windows or Linux USB drivers).

The Norton Ghost 9 and up I know the guys here on these boards discovered some of those had a version of 32-bit genuine Ghost that runs in those bootable product CDs as well (which was a shock to our product team, we weren't informed they were doing that - yay, politics).

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Nigel Bree

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Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Reply #12 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:38pm

ericfree1 wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 9:29pm:

I'm just guessing it's a RAM drive

Yup, it is. All bootable CDs tend to work that way - the El Torito CD boot standard is for a small RAMdisk that either emulates a floppy disk or a small HDD. If that mini-boot doesn't load MSCDEX then it can't access the rest of the files on the CD. I don't know what's on the SW CD though, never had to boot using Systemworks edition to know what they did.

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El_Pescador

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Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003.
Reply #13 - Aug 4^th, 2008 at 10:48pm

Quote:

"... Norton Ghost 9 and up I know the guys here on these boards discovered some of those had a version of 32-bit genuine Ghost that runs in those bootable product CDs as well (which was a shock to our product team, we weren't informed they were doing that..."

Retail boxed copies of both Norton Ghost 10.0 and the initial version of Norton Save & Restore had fully "fleshed-out" versions of RESTOREGHOST.EXE (in reality GHOST32.EXE) and GHOSTEXP.EXE onboard. Creating a WIN PE analog on CD such as the Reatogo-X-PE as discussed in the link below provides a very useful tool for those devotees of "cold-imaging" such as myself:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1144041767/0#0 Roll Eyes

El Pescador

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Nigel Bree

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	Re: Doing restores without a floppy drive from Ghost 2003. Reply #14 - Aug 5^th, 2008 at 1:30am Thanks for the clarification as to the versions that had this, always appreciate some piscine precision . As I said, since no-one involved in real Ghost knww this was happening it's no surprise I'm wrong about the exact version numbers.
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