kryptobs2001,

I think all mobos in the last 4-5 years have already got the ability to detect external USB storage during POST.   When detected, it will be recognized automatically , and you don't need any USB drivers anymore to use it.   Even DOS will give a drive letter if it is FAT32.   If NTFS,  DOS wont see it, but Ghost can still see it and list the drive with CDRW/DVDR-W it finds.    Unless of course, if you use a very old motherboard.   But since you can boot from a USB thumb drive,  there is no reason why it can't  detect your external hdd.   Check your drive list within Ghost....it should be there.

Serville wrote on Jan 14^th, 2009 at 3:21pm:

While that's true, the vast majority of BIOSes out there will only recognise USB mass storage for boot purposes; so, *one* of the USB host controllers and one attached mass storage device will be exposed by the BIOS as a drive, and the way most BIOSes work that one mass storage device, will when you boot from it assume the BIOS location of the first hard drive in the system (0x80 in the INT13 API system).

The right answer for the original poster is to use the current editions of genuine Ghost which in addition to DOS provide Windows PE or Linux boot disks (and can create the thumb drives, and all that other good stuff) that have drivers for a wide range of USB host adapters and can mount all the external storage, rather than using a version which a) over 5 years old now, and indeed predates bootable USB media support and in addition is a version that b) was licensed for home use with one computer.

kryptobs2001 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2009 at 7:23am:

It's pretty unlikely. Booting from a USB device involves the BIOS taking exclusive control of at least one of the USB controllers (and possibly more of them, depending on the presence of USB human-interface devices); that means that the other USB ports on any USB controllers the BIOS has control of are generally unavailable to other software.

To resolve this was the main purpose of the EHCI USB host adapter specification, which defines a method to allow transfers of control to and from the system BIOS and driver software loaded later on. I know of no external USB mass storage driver software that supports this; the corporate editions of Ghost from 8.0 on do contain built-in USB drivers which were written to work with the EHCI specification, earlier versions use external drivers.

One significant problem (which even affects corporate editions of DOS-based Ghost to some extent) is the human-interface devices; different software *cannot* share low-level control over a single USB host adapter - even for software at both ends supporting the EHCI specification, the transfer of control of the host adapter is all or nothing. So, even with the later corporate editions, you can't use a USB mouse and keyboard if you want Ghost to take over the USB host adapters to work with USB mass storage, and this problem is largely why I don't know of external mass storage drivers for DOS that handle this either.

None of this applies with the Windows or Linux versions of Ghost in the current versions of Ghost, since the underlying operating system takes care of working with all the USB mass storage as well as providing USB human-interface drivers so you don't lose control over mouse and keyboard.

kryptobs2001 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2009 at 7:23am:

I'm not meaning to suggest you've done anything wrong, but as a senior Symantec employee who works on the corporate product (indeed, no other person on Earth has as long an association with the Ghost product as I do) I can speak with authority on the subject of Ghost's licensing. Ghost 2003 is a consumer product, not a corporate volume-licensed product - Ghost 2003 did not and has not ever existed in volume SKUs. It was only ever sold on the basis that it was to be used with one PC; if any Symantec sales or support employee has ever told you different, they have given you wrong information.

[ Only the corporate and OEM editions (which were sold at a much lower cost per seat) were and still are licensed differently, and for any more than a handful of PCs the corporate editions were always significantly cheaper (even before any upgrade or other discounts) in addition to having more specialized support (and being supported for a longer period of time), and having more features. ]

kryptobs2001 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2009 at 7:23am:

That's good to know, but if our corporate sales staff sold you or support staff told you it was fine to use Ghost 2003 then they did so inappropriately - indeed, if that's what has happened then if you have an account manager you are welcome to refer them to me, because I will tell them the exact same thing.

Well in that case I've decided to try to just boot from the external HDD and take the thumb drive out of the equation. It's not exactly what we want, but it will work.

So now, I'm having a new issue though. I'm using the hp boot disk utility to format this drive, but it seems that the drive is too big for, I'm guessing, the fat32 file system. I'm guessing I just need to change the block size, but this utility does not allow me to do that. Does anyone know of an alternative way?

kryptobs2001 wrote on Jan 16^th, 2009 at 12:10pm:


If it wasn't so REAL, it would be almost funny.
I just set up a 200 gig WD IDE drive using my boot Floppy.

I first ran FDISK to set up one partition, and it's automatically made active.
Then I ran the DOS Format routine which formatted the (Storage) drive as FAT-32. 
That's preferable for storing Ghost images, pictures, music, movies and the like.
You need to have just one computer that you can use as a Setup PC, for making HD's, Flash Drives, CD's, etc.
That PC needs to have a Floppy Disk Drive in it.
I have a floppy drive in every one of my PC's, just for max compatibility, but I keep one little PC for my utility work, so I never risk messing up my main PC, while formatting a HD, etc.

Life is just so much easier in the old PC shop, when you have a floppy drive and a few simple utilities.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow 

PS: Just today, I solved a similar problem to the one that started this thread. 
I connected an External 200 gig IDE drive to my PC via a Firewire cable.  Windows sees it....no problem.  But Ghost 2003 didn't see it at all.
My solution was to break out my Ghost 11.5 boot Flash Drive and 11.5 saw the External Drive on the Firewire cable with NO Problems.
Using 11.5, I was able to clone my main drive to my External drive, all 34 gigs of it, in just 40 minutes.  Average transfer rate was 830 MB/min.

Rama wrote on Jan 18^th, 2009 at 5:59pm:

It depends entirely on what you do with the disks, the importance of the data on them, and how often you write to them (writing being the thing FAT-type filesystems are truly wretched and unsafe at). I personally would recommend most users completely avoid using FAT-type filesystems in a permanently installed hard disk in a computer, regardless of disk size.

Removable media are used in completely different ways, however, so there's a place for it there for interchange purposes. In between are appliance-type uses - PVRs, game consoles, etc - where it's not being used for general-purpose storage and as pieces of consumer electronics we're more tolerant of failure. If you're making a removable hard disk for something like Ghost images (big files, written to only very infrequently) that's more like an appliance scenario.

Rama wrote on Jan 18^th, 2009 at 5:59pm:

I believe it was 2Gb, and to be fair that does depends how you expect to work with your images. The advantages of sticking to the 2Gb size limit which exists in FAT and ISO9660 filesystems or DOS mapped network drives is all dependent on the likelihood of ever needing to use those media types. If you can be absolutely sure you won't need to go near those, you're safe to do something different.

Sticking to 2Gb is just something I mention because most folks aren't in a position to evaluate their future needs very well, so it's just about avoiding potential future pitfalls where they would end up stuck.

Rama wrote on Jan 18^th, 2009 at 7:17pm:

While I'd say you definitely should be running NTFS, if you aren't already doing so then it's something you need to make a planned transition to. And although it's a change that would be beneficial, you have to balance that against the fact that change itself is disruptive. So, take your time and perhaps take stock of other technology pieces that might fit into the picture.

For instance, take virtualization; it's obviously a great way to do dry runs of disaster recovery plans and regularly validating that your backup strategy is working, but you might want to think whether you would even prefer to use VMs in the actual recovery if it lets you get back up quicker initially, and then migrate VMs back to physical as you provision infrastructure to replace whatever you lost.