Hello, this is my first post here. I noticed that you do not have a forum for ghost 7, and I believe that this would be the proper forum for this question. The problem also does not seem to be version dependent, so it should not matter that I am using Ghost 7 as opposed to 8. I will start with the back story, the goal, then detail the steps I have taken to the best of my memory.

I work for a small corporation, and I am working on creating a standard image for our Dell Optiplex GX260 series machines. In the past, this was tried using multicast. This caused such network delays that we immediately began to receive support tickets from users saying they could not access network resources. It is not possible to upgrade the network for something such as this. This rules out our ability to multicast the images.

The solution we would like to use is to put the images on an external hard drive. Many of the machines to be imaged do not contain floppy drives, so ideally booting from the external usb drive is necessary. I ran into a large host of problems with this, and have resolved almost all except for booting from the external hard drive. Our machines do support booting from usb, and even have that option standard on the boot menu.

I will outline the steps I have taken, including failures and successes.

1. I made a boot floppy from Ghost's boot floppy utility, and copied the boot sector as well as the files onto the external drive. This resulted in NTLDR missing error. I researched this, and then copied NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM onto the drive. It then attempted to boot to nonexistent windows. I then tried to boot from the floppy, and even that did not work.

2. I made a boot floppy through windows format utility, and copied the ghost files onto the floppy. This successfully booted to ghost, but I was unable to access the USB drive to receive images within ghost. Ghost detected the drive as a physical drive, but DOS did not assign it a drive letter. This makes sense as the drive was NTFS.

3. I copied these boot files to the usb, and received the same 2 errors as previously (NTLDR error if not present, attempt boot to nonexistent windows if present)

4. I did further research, and found that FAT/FAT32 filesystem may be necessary to do this. I formatted the drive as FAT32, and made the size correct for FAT32 specifications. I this time received a different error than when using non-bootable media previously. Previously I got a message simply stating "remove disks or other media, then reboot", or "f2 to retry boot". This time I received message "missing operating system". On the good side, I was now able to read from the drive and it was assigned a drive letter.

5. The following I attempted with the drive formatted as FAT(aka FAT12), FAT16, and FAT32, and met the correct size specifications, respectively. Following bootdisk.com, I attempted using both mkbt and DD to copy the floppy boot sector onto the external drive according to the directions for each of these utilities. I continued to receive "missing operating system" error.

6. I tried other solutions provided by bootdisk.com including the HP utilities, and using windows format utility to format the drive as a bootable floppy by enabling the disabled "make an ms-dos boot disk" checkbox.

7. I formatted the drive back to a 32GB FAT32 partition, and have left the rest of the drive unpartitioned for now. I used the multicast utility to dump the image to my second machine on an isolated network connection so as to not cause interruption to the users I support. I then copied the images to the 32GB FAT32 partition on the external hard drive. I can currently run ghost and image successfully from the external USB drive by booting from my boot floppy. However, There are machines other than my Test Bed machine that do not contain floppy drives. In order for this to be deployed as our imaging solution, I need to be able to boot from USB into Ghost.

If anyone has any information that they believe would be helpful, I would be most appreciative.

@Nightowl

Thank you very much for your explanation as to what may be going on. Unfortunately, I have just tried this solution, and still receive the "missing operating system" error. I have also tried using raw write to completely copy an image and MBR off of a tested working boot floppy onto the drive, which resulted in the same missing operating system error. I am beginning to fear that due to some hardware restriction on this HDD(Maxtor OneTouch 4, purpose-built external HDD), or on the motherboard(The boot menu says USB Flash device, not USB external HDD), I will not be able to use this particular HDD to boot into ghost.  I will continue to try new things, and am willing to take any further advice. 

Does Ghost solution suite have some other method of deploying images that may solve my problem? Note that the only real problem is that we cannot multicast the images over the network, due to bandwidth limitations. If anyone has any other ideas for a solution to this problem, then booting from USB will not be necessary.

 HelpfulITGuy

Alternatively--getting creative--create a bootable flash drive that runs Ghost that accesses the stored image on the external USB HDD--not a single component solution--have to have the flash drive and the external HDD together--but would probably work!

I found one thing. Using MBRwiz, I saw that the partition was not set as active. I set it to active, then tried to boot to it using the files on the 98SE disk. It did NOT return "operating system not found, however, it got past POST, I chose to boot from usb, and the system hung from that point. rebooted, cleared MBR with MBR wiz, and rebooted into DOS. DOS wanted me to use Fdisk, so I am fdisking right now. will edit shortly when I have some results.

edit1: Strangely enough, fdisk thinks the size of the drive is 25 GB when  it is actually 512GB. I will probably be using gdisk after this.

edit2: It appears fdisk has hosed me. I get the worst error of all on boot. "f1 to retry boot, f2 to enter setup utility". It does this one when it can not read the boot media at all. gonna repartition with gdisk and see what I can get

edit3:   WIN!  After many failed attempts, Re-partitioned using gdisk, set size to 32768 MB(32GB). Used MBRwizard to set partition to active, THEN formatted using disk management. Booted with win98 SE bootdisk, ran sys.com a: c:. The order of operations seemed to matter. I will next be replacing the win98 files with winxp boot disk files, and copying ghost onto the drive. If this fails, I will cry. Major thanks to Nightowl for the help, and Rad for providing this totally rad resource.

edit4: After copying the files from the boot disk made through windows XP( which makes a windows ME bootdisk), It appears that it is REQUIRED to use win98 bootdisk files to boot to the drive. A simple sys.com a: c:, rather than copying all the bootdisk files, works just fine.

urelated edit: unrelated question. How can I make ghost images without pirating windows XP? I would like to use the actual product keys rather than having the same product key on every machine.

No, the issue is not the site license for ghost, but the licensing for Windows XP. Each of our machines has a different product key on a sticker on the top of it. These are internal machines, but I'm not comfortable with each machine being imaged with the same Windows product key.

As far as your question about the usb, the systems are fairly new. I couldn't tell you a date when they were gotten, but they are running on P4 2.8 GHz processors, and they do access the HDD just fine and register them as a physical disk, even before DOS. This is further cemented by the fact that I removed the USB drivers from the boot disk entirely, and currently have a working boot disk, a working boot external HDD, and I can read my images off the HDD just fine. I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. It seems that Fdisk is just not a great utility for working with external drives. It made the drive basically unusable when I partitioned it, not to mention getting the size way wrong. GDisk and format both read the capacity correctly.

I'm not sure what was done about licensing during the earlier network imaging attempts, as this project wasn't in my hands at that time. From what you described, I'm not certain if SysPrep is the right option for my needs. We are attempting to use an image that images the machine with Windows as well as a host of software that is standard for our business.

hello,

here is a useful information for you
it uses a FAT32 partition on hard drive like dell do
except you got your own image dell use CTRL + F11
you use F10 or F11
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14127&st=20&p=111856&#entry1118...

it is faster than external USB specially if it is old machine wit USB 1.1

regards Ben

 HelpfulITGuy

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Hey--no problem.  We are all learning from sharing our collective experience here at the Radified forums--not every suggestion is *best* for everyone--each user has to determine if a suggestion is appropriate for them.

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Speed, especially with USB and optical discs can be an issue.  Your result sounds like the system is defaulting to USB 1.x rather than using 2.0!  That can be a problem if components are not fully compatible with the DOS drivers that are in use!

You could possibly consider storing the images *locally*--either on a separate HDD, or a separate partition--which could even be *hidden*, but still available to Ghost booted to DOS via a boot disk or disc--HDD-to-HDD or partition-to-partition is the fastest way to create and restore Ghost images!