[SOLVED] Ghost Floppy to CD troubles

[link470]

Hey everyone. Working frantically on the images before school starts on September 2nd, and currently I have a bunch of images ready, and a bunch of systems ready and labs being rebuilt. However, none of the computers have anything on them, time to image!

I've got these annoying floppy disks that I usually use, a few for each system type in the school. However many of these machines now don't have floppy drives. I have the floppies, but no drives. So I need to make CD's out of them if possible.

So I take the functioning ghost multicast boot disk for, lets say, a Compaq Evo, and pop it into my Windows XP machine. I then open Nero, open the Burning Rom and select the CD-ROM [Boot] option, and specify the drive I'm going to use. I enable floppy emulation, and I burn the CD from the floppy disk.

Here's the problem. On newer machines, there actually is no problem, Ghost boots great, and it works like a charm and takes 4 seconds to boot instead of a minute and a half from a floppy. Much easier to put a cd in, boot, take it out, move to next machine [repeat], than having to wait for ages for floppy disks. But when I go to boot the Compaq Evo for example, or an HP Compaq D530 slim PC, it doesn't work! These don't do squat. As soon as the cd starts booting the machine shows one line of something like 66667777^^^^^^^^wingdingwingdingwingding [not the text "wingding" but like, wingdings of some sort] and halts. So I don't know if it's the CD-ROM drive, the BIOS of the system, maybe the cd itself? Has anyone else come across this?

Thanks so much! The sooner I can get this worked out the better! I really appreciate it.

[marco84]

Take a look at this, it may be better than creating a bootable CD.....
Bootable USB

[imiddleton25]

can these machines boot to any cd ??

try some other cd like Ultimate Boot CD - Overview


to see if its the machines hardware or your ghost disks

[FN-GM]

We use this - Universal TCP/IP Network Bootdisk for M$ Networks

has nearly all the NIC drivers!

[link470]

I've actually got that disk made, the network boot disk. I was reading up on it. Now that I have the boot disk made though, I've been so busy running around that I'm very confused on what to do next as to make it into a cd with the ghost executable. I heard somewhere that I have to enable CD-ROM support as well, however, I have no idea how that's done, and I can't find anything anywhere on the internet showing how to enable it.

Can someone please walk me through the steps now that I have a fresh network boot disk made from the installer from the website [after making the Windows XP Startup Disk] into making it a ghost boot cd?

Thanks so much

[FN-GM]

Hi there,

1. make the XP bootdisk.
2. download netbootdisk
3. run the batch file in there, this will make your disk
4. in your ghost share put the ghost.exe file in there, you will find this with your existing ghost install
5. on the bootdisk find a file called logon.bat clear all existing text and use this:

net use G: \\ghostserver\ghostshare
ghost -noide

you will need to edit the path, that will map a network drive and boot right into ghost once you have used the boot disk.

To make you floppy into a CD Rom follow this: http://www.netbootdisk.com/bootcd.htm

[DMcCoy]

Hi there,

1. make the XP bootdisk.
2. download netbootdisk
3. run the batch file in there, this will make your disk
4. in your ghost share put the ghost.exe file in there, you will find this with your existing ghost install
5. on the bootdisk find a file called logon.bat clear all existing text and use this:

you will need to edit the path, that will map a network drive and boot right into ghost once you have used the boot disk.

To make you floppy into a CD Rom follow this: Universal TCP/IP Network Bootdisk for M$ Networks

As a slight aside to the discussion (more useful stuff below ) if you are mapping drives for ghost, you are doing it wrong

All you really need is a universal PXE boot image and RIS/3com PXE stuff (for GSS 2.5).

Nearly all machines support PXE boot these days. Most of my student machines have no CD or floppy so it's network boot only.

As for the drive mapping, you should be using ghostcast server to push the images rather than pulling them individually from the clients.

[FN-GM]

yer but this guy wants to make a CD, anyway i now use ghostcast i dont even need to visit the machine

[link470]

I should add that I use Ghost Multicasting. All I need to do is be able to boot with the network drivers, boot ghost, and and join a multicast session on each machine. It's just the "making the floppy have cd rom support" that's the issue. After I have cd rom support, apparently that gives me control to browse the file structure now of the CD, and I can then command my way over to ghost.exe, run it, and join the session [unless I have an autorun file of some sort to load the correct network driver, and then load ghost].

Thanks you guys for all your help so far!

EDIT:
Oh! I don't know if I mentioned I want the ghost executable ON the cd, not on a network share. So really, I just want to use Nero to use floppy emulation, copy the IMA image of the net boot disk and then be able to have cd rom support so I can browse the cd to access the ghost executable. This last part seems to be the hard part. I can now boot the net boot disk if I burn a copy of the IMA, but I cannot access ghost on the cd. I've tried placing it in the root of the cd, I just can't enable cd rom support, that's literally all I need but I don't have a clue how to do it.

EDIT:
.................................................. ................................................I found the menupref.bat..........shutting up................