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Hi all,
Anyone have any instructions on how to do this?
I follow the creating boot wizard in ghost, but all i get is an image file of ghost. I then burn the image file through Nero but nothing. Not a bootable CD.
What am i doing wrong??
Help would be much appreciated!
You need to create an IMA (image file) file of the boot disk, and then burn that image file through Nero.
You'll need an older version of Nero, like 5.5 I think or the full version i think.
Here are the steps someone else wrote for an PXE boot guide, but it works for creating a CD.
You will need to download the program WinImage from www.winimage.com
Open WinImage
Insert the first Symantec Ghost network boot disk into the drive.
Select ‘Disk' from the menu items.
Select ‘Read Disk' to import the flopping disk into WinImage.
When importing is completed, select ‘Image' from the menu items.
Select ‘Change Format' and select ‘2.88 MB' then click OK.
Insert the second Symantec Ghost network boot disk into the drive.
In WinImage, in the recently imported image, open the ‘Ghost' folder.
Select ‘Image' from the menu items and select ‘Inject'.
Browse to the floppy drive and select ‘ghost.exe' and click Open.
Save the image to the as an .IMA file
Then burn this .IMA file via Nero to a CD. Its a bit of a pain but it works.
ah cheers mate. ill give that a shot!
I have a tutorial for that on my K-5 computer lab site.
Creating a standard ghost CD boot disk for cloning lab computers
But that would not be my first choice to build a boot disk. I prefer to build a BartPE bootable disk with ghost on it. Main reason being that the BartPE CD will come right out the box with support for many more network cards. You can EASILY add your own network card driver files too. This is a huge advantage over the ghost CD setup, allowing you to ghost computers across the network on a much greater variety of machines. Not to mention that a BartPE Cd can be used for quick and dirty data recovery and lots of other useful things with the proper plugins.
My second choice would be to use the netbootdisk.com method. I can't be bothered with having to download that boot disk setup designed for a FLOPPY and then jumping through some NERO burning hoops to convert that to a bootable CD. Although once that is done, I do like the slick method of simply dropping the old DOS ghost.exe file into a shared folder and calling from across the network with the bootable CD.
Do your PCs support PXE booting? If so definately worth looking into setting up a Ghost boot option on the RIS menu, quite easy and definately a huge benefit over CDs/Floppies/USB etc..
in answer to this question.This is a complete nightmare... I have managed to get the ghost image on cd that was easy enough however my next task is to create a multiple network card boot disc containing ghost....does anyone have no how to help?
Which version of Ghost do you have?
If it's a recent one you can make a Universal Network Boot CD.
I'm telling you.... BARTPE is your answer. Ghost's boot disc version is extremely limited in it's nic card selection. BartPE has a network card folder that you can add ANY driver you need. Lets say you had several Toshiba laptops that you want to ghost. You use a freeware driver backup program called windrivers and backup the toshiba's nic drivers to a folder. You would take those files in that folder and drop them into the BartPE nic card folder. burn a new BartPE cd with those drivers and Voila! you have network support for the Toshiba.Quote:
Originally Posted by Liam
You download the BartPE builder program. You pop in an XP pro or better yet Windows Server 2003 R2 Cd. You drop a ghost.exe file into a folder on the BartPE builder program. Now you click "Build" and it combines your Windows i386 files from your windows Cd and the files from the BartPE builder. That makes a new .iso file that you burn to a CD. That CD is bootable and now has quite a bit of support for most nic cards. There are sites that you can download "driver packs' that have nic card company drivers from A-Z. Plus like I said, you can add your own. you could easily build a bartpe disc that has nic card support for every computer on campus and then some.
I've made a step by step youtube video for my site on how to build a BartPE CD. 5 minutes. Another 3 minute video about how to add nic drivers.
Did I mention BARTPE is FREE ?? google it.
The issue is BartPE is not useful when none of your machines have cdrom drives. The NIC driver is mostly a non issue with a universal PXE one, although there are a couple of minor exceptions where it doesn't fully work.
I have done the disc now its useful. How do i run ghost from this?
Pop that disc into a client machine. Shutdown the machine. Restart it and insure that it boots to the CD-ROM. On my Dells I have to press f2 or F12 to get it to boot to CD instead of the Hard Drive. yours may be different. When the CD boots, it asks if you want to start network support. Say yes. It sets up the driver for your nic card, and then installs network components such as TCP / IP and automatically gets an IP address from your DHCP server. You do have a DHCP server on the LAN ?
At this point, your machine is runnning completely off the mini windows installation on the CD and you have established a connection to the network. Are you with me ? Now you map a network drive to a shared folder on another machine on the LAN. lets say your machine on the LAN was named IMAGESERVER and the shared folder was named DELLGX620,
BartPE has a mini GUI to do drive mappings, your mapping looks like this:
\\IMAGESERVER\DELLGX620
The gui wants a username and password of someone who has permissions to write to the shared folder. Put the name and password for the admin of the IMAGESERVER machine.
You are running off the CD, you are on the network, and you have a drive mapped to a shared folder on another machine on the network.
All you do now is go into the programs and start ghost. ( I am assuming you copied your ghost32.exe into the C:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\ghost8\files folder at this point ?) If so then choose Local > Disk > to IMAGE. Pick the disk or partition you want to clone as your source, then navigate to the mapped drive you made earlier and pick a name for your destination image file. Click Save and pick a compression level for the file. Higher is smaller and slower to go across to the folder, but smaller and quicker to come back when cloning disks.
DONE. depending upon image size and network speeds, could be about 20-40 minute process.
Good luck.
Thanks for that. I have copied ghost.exe into C:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\ghost8\files folder but it does not appear in the programs section, does it have to be that version of ghost to work? Also my intentions of this is that when we have a broken machine i pop this disc in, the disc recognises the NIC,loads the drivers and ghost software loads automatically. We have one at the moment that was made some time ago but this only support a few NICs and our range is wide and varied now. Hence the reason i need this disc. Does that make sense?
ghost32.exe is the one that runs on the CD. remember that the BARTPE is made up using windows Xp or server 2003, those are 32 bit operating systems. ghost.exe is the old dos version 16bit. And no, it does not have to be version 8. I use version 11 in mine and it works flawlessly.
Lets make sure you have the files in the right places:
In here: C:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\ghost8
a folder called files
and files called:
ghost.htm
ghost.inf
ghost_nu2menu.xml
switches.txt
Now, inside the folder called files
ghost32.exe
When you build your BARTPE .iso file with the BARTPE builder, there is a button on the bottom left called Plugins. click that and it opens up a list of all the plugins that can be enabled or disabled in BartPE. Look for the ghost plugin and ensure that it is ENABLED. Now rebuild the .iso. When you build your new bartpe .iso file, ensure that you have NO ERRORS. you can usually live with warnings, but errors no.
Burn your iso and when you boot up the new disc, you should see GHOST in the menu now.
Yes, the bartpe disc will load the nic, start the network configuration automatically. On the standard BartPE build, you will have to manually go to the ghost menu. However, having ghost startup automatically is something lots of people have wanted to do in the past, that issue has been dealt with and you can do it too with some minor tweaking. I have done it , but it's been a while . You'll have to do a little googling or searching on their forum for the answer, but I remember it to be fairly straightforward.
Good Luck.
Yes it is when you get your head around it. Well you have answered my question straight away, im using ghost.exe. That would explain alot. Well thanks for your help il let you know how i get on in due course.