[ghost] Boot Ghost from USB

[sted]

Thanks guys...Your right the letter didn't make it difference, but the imaging process was really slow.

 

ghost network speed can be affected by all sorts of things from driver versions to switches and so on i wouldnt worry too much about it as you will probably spend more time trying to increase the speed than you will gain by speeding it up. It may even be down to 1 duff nic somewhere in teh building sending out garbage

[mallyg34]

ghost network speed can be affected by all sorts of things from driver versions to switches and so on i wouldnt worry too much about it as you will probably spend more time trying to increase the speed than you will gain by speeding it up. It may even be down to 1 duff nic somewhere in teh building sending out garbage

 

I'm not even sending the image across the network. Im restoring locally and it was still really slow. It was saying about an hour. Where as normally when I boot with my PE cd and install from USB, it takes my image 2 mins to restore.

[mallyg34]

PE Builder: Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

PeToUSB: GoCoding.Com

 

First create a PE environment with PE Builder – no need to create an ISO or burn to CD.

 

Create a FAT Primary Partition (maximum 512Mb I believe) on the HDD you are going to use. The rest can be NTFS or FAT32 Logical Partition.

 

You may want to turn off System Restore on the larger partition(s).

 

Start PeToUSB and use the settings shown in the attachment.

 

Click “Start” and allow program to format and continue. It will make the primary partition bootable and install Bart’s PE environment. You should now be able to boot into Bart PE from this HDD.

 

Hey Gerry, Im trying your way now since I couldn't get it to work the way I want the other ways. How did you partion you drive since you can't make two partitions on a USB.

[PEO]

You can create one in the ghost boot disk creater.

[PEO]

I also have a unversal nic driver if your intrested, but I wont be able to get this till Im sat at the server on monday

[tmcd35]

I thought Ghost came with two universal PXE drivers as standard? I found Ghost and NICs to be very picky depending on which machine I was standing in front of. I ended up with 6 USB stick with different combinations of Ghost and NIC drivers depending to cover all posibilities -

 

MS-DOS + PXE Driver1

PC-DOS + PXE Driver1

MS-DOS + PXE Driver2

PC-DOS + PXE Driver 1

MS-DOS + cocktail of popular NIC drivers

PC-DOS + coctail of popular NIC drivers

 

Could never get it down to 1 usb pen stick for all architectures. Some booted PC-Dos others crashed and vise-versa. Some machines liked one of the universal PXE drivers others had to have their specifiv NIC driver. All very frustrating.

 

Even booting Clonezilla from a CD/USB penstick/Ext. HDD is better than mucking around with Ghost and NIC drivers IMHO.

[sted]

I thought Ghost came with two universal PXE drivers as standard? NIC drivers IMHO.

 

the newer version do 11+ iirc

 

ivr just had to make up a cd with the new version of netbootdisk on it as one of my schools has got more nforce based pcs sigh at least these have rom drives lol

[MkII]

Necropost alert!

 

Just been playing with this and trying unsuccessfully some of the methods above.

 

Due to our geographically large WAN and widely dispersed clients ghostcasting/ server deployment is impractical. We've been using the Ghost CD method but ever changing SATA standards makes that a pain.

 

The method is quite simple:

1. create a USB bootable drive with the ghost utility or the miriad of methods found on the web (FAT or FAT32 - FAT if you need to deploy to older clients)

2. take an image of the USB flash drive using any cloning software

3. restore that image, limiting it's size to less than 2gb, to your portable USB hard drive

4. create the other primary NTFS formatted partition

[m25man]

Wow, this old thread back again....

 

Technology moves though and this handy tool should solve the problem.

 

Step 1. Create a Ghost Recovery Boot CD using the Bootdisk Tools from within the Ghost Menu.

Step 2. Convert the CD or DVD into an ISO image

Step 3. Download this tool from the Microsoft Store site (it's free) http://store.microsoft.com/help/iso-tool

Step 4. Transfer Ghost ISO to USB stick using tool installed in step 3.

 

For those with no interest in Ghost because WDS is better, you can use the same tool to create D.A.R.T USB sticks or just about any bootable ISO image can be easily transferred to USB.

 

It's a great little tool for those not used to diskpart or like me have No time to mess about other tools like HP disk on key and Unetbootin.

[cpjitservices]

we have ghost on a seperate partition on all the hosts we have, just set that drive to boot when we need a re-image of a machine. We use Ghost 8, so for a re-image we open the server select the image and click listen - go to the host bot from hd2 and it'll bot ghost and then just use multicast and then start on the server, then hd1 back to boot - blosh! job done. takes about 10 minutes for a full re-image.

 

As for drivers, we have a massive drivers database held on one of the image servers so if we need a driver we go to there and 9 times out of 10 it's on there so we just use that.

 

Ghost runs on hd2 by it's boot image of BartPE, there is a link to open ghost inside that on our machines.

[m25man]

The other method we use is to add the Ghost Boot image to WDS, F12 boot the ghost console pull the image from the network share or local USB drive.

You need NTFS format USB drives to create and store ghost images larger than 2gb in a single file.

[MkII]

Right that sounds ok. Although without WDS: I F12 boot to the USB HDD which autoboots into ghost where I pick the image.

[Duke5A]

Thanks guys...Your right the letter didn't make it difference, but the imaging process was really slow.

 

The DOS version of Ghost is really fading away. Rolling up LAN drivers and SATA support into its boot disks is a pain to keep up to date, not to mention the performance hit you're noticing. It was mentioned earlier in the thread to create a BartPE disk, and trust me, this is the route you want to go.

 

If you purchased a copy of Ghost, then it should also have a copy of Ghost32 included. This version runs under a Windows environment and you'll notice a significant uptick in speed. Additionally, updating the BartPE disk is as simple as finding Windows XP drivers for the hardware you want to support.

 

And even though not all of your clients support PXE, I would at least setup a PXE boot TFTP somewhere on your network. I did this at my work and used the daylights out of it. Follow this guy's guide to making BartPE PXE boot friendly if you want.

 

Howto boot BartPe from pxe on asus eeepc - no cdrom, no usb stick. (Page 1) / Eee PC and Windows XP / EeeUser Forum