Caesar

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There's the problem--what one person sees as a *Universal* boot disc, the next person will want some other feature or functionality--it's an ongoing moving target as hardware advances and OSs change--often one has to change the boot disc to accommodate those changes!

And, it may depend on what version of Ghost you have available--over time certain functions have been incorporated into the *ghost.exe* program that previously required DOS drivers to be loaded separately during DOS boot.  If the function is built-in to the *ghost.exe* program, then loading DOS drivers may create conflicts!

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I notice you don't specify which version of Ghost that will be used!

If you have a licensed copy of Ghost, when you do the full install, you will get a Ghost Boot Wizard that can assist one in creating various boot disks, or disc--depending on the version of Ghost--these can then be modified for additional customizing if needed--they give you a starting point!

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It's such a short and simple sentence--seems like such a simple request!

To my knowledge--no one on the forums here has ever posted an iso file of their boot disc that matches your *universal* request--I've only seen posting of a list of boot files and the contents of the *config.sys* and *autoexec.bat* boot files.

But, if you spend time searching the forum here, you will find many threads on creating a boot floppy disk or optical disc--and each thread often has multiple replies trouble shooting how to make that particular boot disk or disc work correctly for that individual's specific system that seems not to be working correctly with the boot files they are attempting to use!

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Even that statement is *complicated*!  Are you asking about SATA HDDs--or SATA optical drives--or both?!

Access to SATA HDDs depends on compatibility between the *ghost.exe* software and the SATA controller--sometimes you have to enter the BIOS and set the SATA controller to *compatibility* or some other mode--there's little consistency how different BIOSs handle this--so Ghost will be able to access the SATA controller in DOS!  Then switch the mode back after using Ghost in DOS and you are ready to return to Windows.  Many BIOS default to the *compatibility mode* and unless you change it to the *SATA* native or enhanced mode--you would not know there is an issue in DOS--because it will already work fine--but certain SATA enhancements when booted to Windows will not be available in this case--but I don't know the details of this!

Access to SATA optical drives in DOS requires a SATA DOS optical driver--*gcdrom.sys*--it can be added in addition to the older PATA optical DOS drivers--you get error messages during boot if a specific type of optical drive is not found--those error messages can be simply ignored.  See below for additional resources:

Ghost 7.5 SATA CD-ROM

Download *gcdrom.sys* here--v2.3 and v2.4 available!

Some additional resources:

GCDROM for DOS command line syntax

SATA optical drive & Ghost 2002 report

How to add SATA DOS optical drive drivers to Boot Disc





Creating a DOS boot disc without having a floppy drive available:  Creating Bootable CD/DVD's Without A:\Floppy Drive

Adding USB support to that boot disc created above:  Adding USB (and Firewire) to Ghost Boot CD

(Cont. in part #2 )

NightOwl wrote on Apr 30^th, 2010 at 11:12am:


Hi Nightowl,

Thanks heaps for the detailed explanation.
I own Ghost versions 8 and 10. Version 8 works best for me.
I'm wondering why "inventing the wheel" again and again.
I'm happy to write a detailed explanation how to implement anyone's own ghost file into a Boot Disk if you do the boot disk part.
It would be great if this community here could work on a boot disk file (and everybody could test it and input their parameters).
It should be completely legal to create and publish such a file in iso format I guess.
Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks again.

Cheers
Caesar