That's interesting, Christer. As you may have read, at present my ext USB is marked but my new IDE/PATA 250GB drive isn't, and depending on whether the USB drive is on or not, I can/cannot see the PATA drive when I use a Bootdisk to boot into PC-DOS. I've been wondering whether to try marking the new PATA drive, either by letting PC-DOS do it or by doing it in the Windows environment, but Nigel Bree is emphatic that doing so will not cure my problem and will not miraculously make both my drives visible to Ghost.

Some time ago, when I installed the new drive and cloned it to the smaller one, that new drive would have automatically been marked (since it was a clone). The ext USB drive was also marked. And yet, as now, I couldn't see either the new drive's or ext drive's partitions, depending on whether the ext drive was switched on or not. So, on the face of it, marking the new drive now wouldn't make a scrap of difference. Under the original Win2k/WinXP dual-boot arrangement I ran, though, both the 80GB main (PATA) drive and the ext drive WERE marked and WERE both visible. So, for me, it's a matter of finding out what's changed that now prevents both being visible. Other than me running Ghost 2003 in WinXP now, rather than in Win2K, the only change I've made from the dual-bbot setup is replacing the 80GB drive by a 250GB version. My machine and BIOS do support large-size drives. The USB 2.0 drivers on my machine are exactly the same as before and are the latest.

Pure and simple logic suggests to me that marking might still be an influence in this. Possibly, the 'law of unintended consequences' applies. In my case, the ext drive's marking was performed originally by Ghost working under Win2K and essentially remains as that. But the current setup functions under WinXP, so one naturally asks the question 'Is there any reason why the current Ghost 2003 should know this?'. Put another way, the original parent Ghost program which marked the ext drive no longer exists. Maybe this leaves the ext drive out on a limb?

Christer, have you or have you not allowed both the main Ghost 2003 program and the Bootdisk to themselves assign driveletters? Conceivably, that's a factor in this problem.
 

Hello again,
you did not use ubcd4win or Acronis 11 in previous link
so you love ghost so here is another free tip and link.


ghost 2003 is basically rubbish as it marks the drives  the corporate version of same software
ghost 7.5 and ghost 8 do not do that.
so get the corporate version of ghost 8 read the tips in link below how to get it



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

read by 96,642

the conclusion: is that to make a bootable ghost floppy or bootable ghost CD  for  recovery you need to have the ghost.exe on the floppy or the bootable CD.
therefore the reverse is also true , that is if you got a ghost bootable recovery cd or floppy eg E-machine recovery CD


or Advent recovery CDS (that use ghost to recover the image) then you a can extract the ghost.exe from it.let it load then press Escape key then using simple DOS commands like DIR and copy *.* C:\temp
assuming your c:drive is fat32.
you get the complete files on the original bottale floppy including the ghost.exe

or simply use winimage or isobuster to extract the boot image including ghost.exe
 
as i said before if you have an e-machine or Advent machine that uses ghost on the recovery CD
you can extract the image with Winimage from the CD including Ghost.exe
or boot with the CD and when you get to the menu were it tells you do you want to
recover the operating system ?? say NO or press ESC key you get A: prompt or a flashing dash
then do a DIR and you will see ghost.exe and all other bootable files.
then put a new floppy in floppy drive
and type
COPY ghost.exe B:
and press enter this is because your RAM drive is A: and floppy becomes B:
so you get your Ghost .exe floppy
this ghost.exe is much better than the personal ones as it is enterprise version(more capabilities)

Ben

".............. if you get the prompt to mark the disk from the DOS-based Ghost, then the drive has been detected fine - if you choose not to mark it, it does drop the drive from the selection box. That's because you're choosing, in effect, not to agree to the EULA (there's simply no other reason not to mark the drives, after all - it's perfectly safe and harmless)".

Nigel,

That does, at least, put a different light on it. The warning message/buttons that you get when you first boot into PC-DOS, though, give the impression, rightly or wrongly, that agreeing to the marking is optional; the message includes a statement that non-marking is, in effect, acceptable for 'forensic-standard' imaging or recovery.

I bow to your superior knowledge of IRQs and how they might affect this situation. However, as I keep stating, before I changed the hard drive for a bigger one, there were no problems with Ghost. I'd been imaging and restoring and cloning (to keep as backup drive) literally for years. There is some sharing of IRQs on my PC but I've never, in all the years that I've had this machine (it's one I built myself, so I know it extremely well), had a single problem with IRQs or with any clashes.

The 'tryout' situation I had was when I simply cloned the original 80GB hard drive and its contents to the bigger 250GB drive, surplanting the former. Absolutely nothing else changed. I ran the tryout, it being dual-boot of Win2K and WinXP, for about a week and everything worked fine, EXCEPT that PC-DOS would refuse to show both drives. As now, it was 'either one or the other but not both'. In theory, there was no need to mark or re-mark that cloned drive, because presumably the original marking got automatically copied across during the cloning process. The ext USB drive, of course, remained completely unchanged. When I ran PC-DOS in that setup, I don't recall being invited to mark the drives, but I can't swear to that. If I was, then I would have agreed to it. However, the net result was still that one of the drives, either the main drive or the ext USB drive, was always inaccessible in PC-DOS.

I could find absolutely no other reason for the problem, so my only recourse was to re-install the 80GB drive. However, I did also want to dispense with my Win2K partition, which unfortunately was on the C partition, so I resigned to low-level formatting the 250GB drive and then re-installing my WinXP and all my apps manually, from absolute scratch. That included Ghost 2003 of course and, as I've earlier described, I managed eventually to update it to 793, the version I'd had before. This is the current setup, and there's no change in the problem - PC-DOS is still refusing to see BOTH the 250GB drive and the ext USB drive. However, I have yet to agree, in PC-DOS, to having the drives marked. Why? Well, simply because (a) the 'tryout' hadn't worked with marking, and (b) because, earlier in these postings, you gave me and others the impression that marking would have no impact at all on this recognition problem.

voximan wrote on Sep 18^th, 2008 at 9:50am:

Except that sometimes other things need them, as in this case, and then you've got no room as Ghost is telling you. Four primary partitions is legal, but since they are a scarce resource using all four of them is not a good idea.

Moreover, when creating an extended partition table, that extended partition table (a secondary copy of the MBR further down the disk) needs a primary partition slot to describe it. So, if you have any extended partitions, you are consuming one slot for that. That means a sensible partitioning arrangement needs to only use two classic primary partitions, and the rest in a linked chain of extended partitions.

The Ghost 2003 variation on the virtual partition system creates a temporary partition within the existing MBR on the boot drive, and that means it needs one of primary partition entries for that. More recent editions of Ghost (GSS2.5, specifically) temporarily replace the original MBR completely while entering the temporary cloning environment and so aren't subject to that limitation any more (however, replacing the MBR code in the drive was not a small step and not without its own attendant difficulties - like most of these things, it's not as easy as end users imagine).

voximan wrote on Sep 18^th, 2008 at 9:50am:

If your existing boot disk isn't using build 793, then that would be useful. The most productive thing you can do (other than try using the -noide and -fni switches as suggested earlier) is use an edition that doesn't employ the Iomega guest drivers, but rather uses Ghost's built-in code. In that case you won't have anything on the USB disk appear as a drive letter in PC-DOS, but Ghost's built-in USB drivers will still allow Ghost to work with the disk; if the root source of the problems is an IRQ conflict, this may well help.

Since my first experience with a PC (a self-built IBM XT-Clone) and MS-Dos 2.0, I've come up with a conclusion that's served me well, all these 28 years.
On any computer there are things that CAN be done, within the limitations of the hardware, but probably shouldn't be done.  That's where experience takes over from youthful exuberance.

Sure, you can partition a HD into four partitions, buy why would you really need to?  The value of even just one extra partition is to have a place (like a closet) to store your "Stuff", away from your OS partition.

 MS gave us a perfect way to further segregate files of different types within a partition.....it's called "Folders".
What a perfectly marvelous invention!

For many years I've been building PC's, and NEVER have I EVER set up a new hard drive without creating (just one) an extra partition, for Storage.
Within that second partition, you can set up folders to house files of different types.  
With just one HD, it's a great place to put Ghost Images of C:.
My own Partition #2 is indeed a very busy place.

I keep seeing references to PC-DOS.  Wasn't that IBM's version of a DOS?
It never caught on, for, I'm sure, some very valid reasons.

When I got my first version of Ghost, it installed on my hard drive.
(sound familiar?)  Then it made for me, my first Ghost boot floppy.
Once I had used that floppy, I couldn't understand why or earth I'd ever want to run Ghost form within Windows, since it had to shell out to DOS anyway.  
I promptly removed the installed Ghost files from my HD, thus freeing up some valuable HD space.

I wanted to add some DOS programs to my Ghost boot disk and kept getting "Incorrect Dos Version" messages that just drove me crazy, till I realized that indeed, I was using the "Incorrect Dos Version" for my boot disk.  After some trial and error, and error, and error, I finally settled on a Windows ME boot disk as my home for Ghost.exe.

To overcome the 1.44meg space limitation of the standard floppy disk, I've moved everything to a 64meg flash drive.  With all the extra space, I've been able to add many helpful utilities, like NTFS4DOS and all the Windows ME Utilities, like FDISK, Format and Scandisk.
With "Nero 8" I can easily burn the contents of the flash drive to a CD, thus creating my own Custom Ghost Boot CD, complete with Ansi-Color Menu.  

Of course, to use a Flash Drive for this exercise, you need a motherboard modern enough to be able to boot from a Flash Drive.
(NOT a minor detail!)  
If not.....the Ghost Boot CD works just fine.

For compatibility with Windows Vista, I've recently changed to Ghost 11.5 on my boot disk.  Ghost 2003 was just getting too old.
It just gets betterer and betterer!

Long live Ghost and those really great guys who wrote it!

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  

voximan wrote on Sep 19^th, 2008 at 10:40am:

The most important thing to try is to see when happens when you start Ghost (either from your boot disk or via the Windows interface) using the -fni switch, to direct Ghost to prefer using the system BIOS over its built-in IDE drivers. This was the first thing suggested in this thread, and it's still the most important thing.

voximan wrote on Sep 19^th, 2008 at 10:40am:

That's because the drive marking is relevant only to discriminate which drive is targeted by an operation initiated from the Windows interface, and what I've been saying all along is that the failure is elsewhere.

Ghost is structured much as any student of the art/science of software construction would expect it to be, in the same layered manner as an operating system:
- At the bottom there is a device layer, which deals with things like Firewire and USB and IDE and such (and a fallback to the system BIOS).
- Above that is a layer which interprets disks and disk partitioning schemes (MBR, GPT, Dynamic Disk, EFI) into volumes.
- Above that is a layer which interprets the contents of those volumes as filesystems (FAT, NTFS, ext2/3, etc.)
- Above that is a layer which looks at the contents of files in those filesystems, such as BOOT.INI or the files making up the Windows registry.

All the above occupies the vast bulk of the code; above that is the thin veneer of user interface, the GUI and the textual processing for the command-line control. The code to look for the disk GUID you select in the Windows user interface is a tiny part of that outer veneer, not any part of the core "operating system" in Ghost, and the failures to detect your disks exist in the behaviour of the low-level layers.

The -fni (or -noide) and related switches are what matters rather than the drive marks because they are the things that direct the initialization behaviour of the low-level disk layers - those lower layers of Ghost aren't finding your disk at all, and that's making things go wrong long before the drive marking comes into play (and what are stopping that code finding a disk with the indicated mark, as the error you now have is saying).

Nigel,

I've now specifically tried the fni switch, doing it within PC-DOS Options. This is with both main drive on and ext drive on. This time, the main drive showed, ie. the source drive and its partitions. However, when I passed to the next step, 'File Name to Copy To', only that main drive's partitions were displayed, not the ext drive's partitions. By 'displayed', I mean 'available in the dropdown menu'. So, it's still a case of 'one or the other but not both'.

I've a log file, taken from Ghost, of the attempts I made earlier today to get it all to work and will post it here later. Maybe you'll be able to spot something in it that'll give a clue as to what's wrong.

During normal operation of Windows, access to the main hard drive is IDE, of course. So, what's the default access in Ghost, then? There's no mention of another access mode, in the manual's description of the switches - it's either IDE access on or IDE access off. The only other hard drive access I know of is PIO, ie. via the CPU.

BTW, when you advise to hit Cntrl C after startup of Ghost, do you mean Windows environment of Ghost or PC-DOS version of Ghost? I can't get anywhere at all with running from the Windows environment, in as much as as soon as PC-DOS starts, it hangs. It's different if I boot straight into PC-DOS, in that I can at least then use its menus.