I apologize in advance if this is a well known issue. I've been lurking for a few hours trying to find an answer to this quetsion, but I haven't come across it yet. Also, I'm about to get verbose.

I made an image of my Dad's computer a very long time ago with a DOS-based version of Ghost (2003, I believe). This PC is used for his home business, so he doesn't like to be without it for long. As it happens, his computer is the same as mine with a very few minor exceptions. To the point where I've been able to restore his image on my computer  with no difficulties.

This weekend his PC crashed, and I attempted to use the Ghost boot floppy to pull the image from my external hard drive. I was unable to. The computer wouldn't see the external hard drive because it is NTFS formatted. When I did this on my PC at home, it was a different external drive, and it was FAT formatted, which I'm guessing is why I had no troubles restoring at my house. Anyhow, I was able to get him back up and running the hard way - reinstalling the OS and all his apps manually. But for the future, I need to figure out the process for getting him up and running a bit more quickly.

So, the DOS based Ghost boot disk doesn't see NTFS devices. That never occurred to me when I decided to replace my old 160GB external drive with a 2TB Cavalry external. But I'm at a loss for how to actually use the GHOs from this device. Some of the things I've tried include:

- using a ghost boot floppy (ghost1.exe). Again, no NTFS support, so my external wasn't found. It didn't see my hard drive either, which I thought was odd. The hard drive is NTFS formatted, so maybe that's why, but when I restored at home (back when my external was still FAT), I didn't have that same problem

- getting ahold of a ligitimate Ghost 9 disc, booting to the recovery environtment, being pushed into the legacy app because GHO isn't supported, and finding that I can see the external drive just fine (it was assigned a drive letter of C: and the image is there) but my hard drive was nowhere to be found. It's currently NTFS formatted as well, but it don't necessarily think that's the issue

- downloading and preparing a disk set with NTFSDOS Pro. This approach has no problem finding my hard drive, with all its contents readable (just not writeable, due to it being a trial version), but it was unable to find my external drive.

- preparing a network boot disk using BCD and BFD (Bart's tools from nu2.nu) but getting hung up at the point of loading the network card drivers. The actual driver doesn't want to work (B57.cab package for Dell's Broadcom Exterme Gigabit blah blah blah), and none of the other packages I've tried would work either.

So, I'm at a loss. I'd really REALLY like to use the external as is. I got a massive drive so that I don't want to kick around with a separate external drives, with one just for my images. If there's one thing that I know it's that the enemy of hard drives is not use but DISuse. My images drive will just sit there until one day down the road when I need to do a restore, and I'll find that the drive has crapped out, and I'll be stuck. I'm also trying to avoid purchasing an updated version of Ghost and making all new images.

Any insight or pointers would be nice. For the time being I can always resurrect the 160GB drive on a case-by-case basis if the situation warrants.

I've moved it for you and welcome to RADIFIED ... ... !

Brian wrote on Apr 6^th, 2010 at 2:45pm:


On my home PC, when the image resided on an external drive which was FAT-formatted, I didn't need SATA drivers in order to restore the image. I picked the source (the external drive) the destination (the internal HDD) and all was well.

When I boot to NTFSDOS Pro, I don't need SATA drivers to see the internal HDD. I can see the contents of the OS drive, and I would be able to run ghost1.exe to do the restore if only it would recognize my external drive through NTFSDOS.

Any idea why I suddenly needs SATA drivers for ghost1.exe to see my internal HDD? Where would I even put these SATA drivers? The only time I've ever needed SATA drivers was druing the original OS install, because that version of XP couldn't see the controller (the bit where you have to press F6 when you boot from the XP CD).

So, where do I put these SATA drivers on the ghost boot floppy so that the ghost program is aware of them and uses them?

Edit: "ghost boot floppy" is a misnomer. It's really just a simple DOS boot disk with the ghost executeable copied over to it.

Ahhh, very good. I misunderstood what you were getting at.

I rebooted into the Ghost 9 recovery environment and I did see the message to press F6 for SCSI and RAID drivers. Not sure how that slipped past me the first time.

Anyhow, I can see both the internal and external now, after several reboots trying ot find the right SATA driver. Thanks for the assist.