There will be another, larger LiveUpdate out sometime in the next week which revs some more components in GSS2.5 (mostly it's driver updates and more improvements to the Boot Wizard, but there are some other things as well).

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 3^rd, 2008 at 5:43pm:

If you create a Ghost bootable DVD with the Boot Wizard (DOS, WinPE, whatever), you should be able to add the image files separately - once you work through the wizard to the screen where you select the output location (say, by choosing an .ISO file) the next screen after that should allow you to add additional files (such as the image files) which go into the ISO outside the boot package proper.

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 3^rd, 2008 at 5:43pm:

Any of the current boot packages can deal with the x64 operating systems fine, since x64 can run all the boot environments we include as-is; the only constraint is DeployAnywhere; that wasn't initially developed in our office and so isn't written to our portability standards - it's being re-done for GSS3.0 to run everywhere but is currently only 32-bit WinPE. However, that constraint just affects what environment it runs in, it can operate successfully against any edition of Windows.

The only case where this won't deal with deploying a 64-bit OS is for Itanium systems, where you have to run the Itanium edition of Windows PE 2.1 - and that wasn't available in time to include in GSS2.5 (it would be nice if we could move to PE2.1 but that won't be happening in a LiveUpdate since we just don't have the staff to do that on top of everything else we have planned and are working on for GSS3.0).

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 4^th, 2008 at 4:01am:

Yes. Every version of Ghost works just the same. Ghost.exe from DOS images 64-bit installs just fine too. So does the Linux version. So does Ghost64.exe

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 4^th, 2008 at 4:01am:

Whichever one suits you. That depends on the hardware you run, which is why we give you all of them we can.

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 4^th, 2008 at 4:01am:

Yes, but you have to build your own boot disks with the appropriate WAIK. However, there's no point unless you're using an Itanium system.

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 4^th, 2008 at 5:26am:

The reason for that is so that each runs in a particular host OS, since those OS's require us to create different ones for each of them.

Ghost.exe is for DOS only. Ghost32.exe is for 32-bit Windows PE (and 32-bit workstation OS's, using hot imaging). Ghost64.exe is for 64-bit Windows PE 2.1 (which does not include a way of running 32-bit Windows binaries) but mainly for 64-bit workstation OS's, using hot imaging - the Volume Snapshot API provided by the OS cannot be called by 32-bit binaries. And finally, there's just plain "ghost" with no .exe extension, which is a 32-bit Linux binary intended to run in the included Thinstation environment. In future we'll probably be offering an Itanium build as well.

The people who use Ghost in business have a lot of different processes they want to build on top of Ghost (to customize and configure the images after deployment) as well as all kinds of exotic hardware that is not able to run every particular preOS. Lots of modern servers can't boot DOS, for instance, or require exotic drivers for their hardware.

Choose whichever preOS suits your needs and works with your hardware, and then just use whichever Ghost binary runs on that preOS.

For question A: The Ghost Boot Wizard can produce DOS and WinPE boot CDs/DVDs (as well as one-click virtual partitions and other exotic things which are also suitable) that can do this for you - the Boot Wizard has an enormous number of of combinations of types of boot environments it can build, and locations it can build them. Your really need to explore the Boot Wizard on your own to learn about all of them since there are so many possibilities.

Although, there's really no need to use cold imaging anyway, unless you have machines with only 256Mb of RAM (since hot imaging needs to buffer changes to the disks in memory, machines with only 256Mb often can't manage it) or are imaging something more exotic than a simple workstation, like a live database server.

For question B, Ghost retains the ability to directly make the target CD/DVD bootable with DOS. That's the only direct approach we support, however. In practice, given how large modern images are anyway, there's not really much practical use in this - you may as well just build a single WinPE boot environment to DVD and keep that separate from the data DVDs.

Bear in mind that as a corporate product, there's really no value in using optical media this this way because it requires so much manual effort to manage the media and so can't effectively be automated. And in a business (as in most homes, for that matter) you'll always have another machine around to run the Boot Wizard on to build a recovery environment with if you don't have a suitable one to hand, so direct bootability is simply not the same kind of deal it was for home use in the old Ghost 2003 product.

Moreover, in terms of good practice it's always better to image either to a second hard drive or even better to a central server over a network since that's easy to do on an automated schedule using the GSS console or by scripting hot imaging on the client machines using the Windows Task Scheduler. Optical backups are not only vastly slower, and more inconvenient, they are also much less reliable in practice than just about anything else.

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 8^th, 2008 at 4:29am:

It's badly worded, but it just means that you shouldn't remove the boot CD until Ghost is actually ready to write to the new disk. that warning only applies to DOS boot CDs, Windows PE 2 boots using a RAMdisk and the warning is just there because that tickbox and the warning text was overlooked during the process of shoehorning WinPE into the GBW.

Ghost has to read a bunch of files (most importantly, Ghost.exe) from the boot CD and hold them in memory temporarily to write to the first disk of the backup set, and it doesn't read that file in until you've decided to write to a target drive and chosen the compression scheme. There's a final prompt to confirm that you want to write to a CD/DVD, and you can't remove the disk before that. After that (or maybe when you're explicitly prompted to put in a new disk) would be the time to change media.

Incidentally, when you tick the tickbox when building a WinPE CD using the GBW it doesn't actually copy all the necessary files into the WIM itself; it does put -ghostoncd onto the command line but it doesn't put the DOS ghost.exe into the WIM file. There's an open defect filed on that but I'm not the guy who maintains the GBW so I can't say much more than that.

For 1), MS-DOS or PC-DOS will work for making the CD/DVD disks with the images bootable while imaging. However, it's an absolutely terrible way of using Ghost when GSS comes with so many better alternatives out of the box, that are innately more reliable and all able to be completely automated.

For 2), that's what I said, although there's more to it than just Ghost.exe, which leads to your question 3), adding Ghost.exe manually will help, but you still need to supply the MS-DOS and PC-DOS system files and MSCDEX.EXE[i] some other way. By default, Ghost's built-in code for this will still try, but it will ask you to insert a floppy. Since almost no modern systems have floppy drives, it's not something that's terribly useful in practice.

Not having WinPE directly making the disks bootable this way is just an oversight, but it's an understandable oversight since the number of customers who use CD/DVD  cold imaging in GSS at all is [i]considerably less than one in a thousand, and for the direct-bootability feature there's simply no real customer benefit in it at all in corporate environments. Given that we have limited number of staff and the product is extremely large and complicated, things that benefit fewer than one in a thousand customers tend to take a back seat to other stuff.

Pablo the Great wrote on Sep 10^th, 2008 at 8:37am:

That would be Eugene; since GSS2.5 came out he's been very active on the official forums dealing with lots of GBW-related issues (as well as Ghost, since he does a lot of work on the cloning engine too - almost all of us here are responsible for more than one executable in the suite), so he's not exactly short of feedback.