Creating a Ghost Boot CD with USB Support

[CBear]

I thought this scenario is common but was blown away by the lack of documentation.

This is what I want to do. I want to ghost my Laptop to a USB 2.0 Exernal Drive. The laptop has no floppy disk. I want to use Ghost 2003 to create and restore these backups. The problem is that Ghost 2003 does not make boot CD's. You can make boot floppies with the USB 2.0 drivers but what good is this when laptops don't have floppy drives anymore? Is there a clear document on how to take these floppies and make a bootable CD? And do any of the files need to be changed? i.e. the autoexec or config.sys? As the drive will be a cd and not a floppy anymore.

It just blows my mind that they don't have an automated mechanism for this. Floppies are so 20th century.

Thanks in advance.....

 

[Wishdiak]

CBear,

Sadly, I don't have one of these modern laptops that lack the "20th century" floppy drive. For that matter, I don't have a USB 2.0 Exernal Drive, so I can't offer much help with either of these.

What I do have is Norton Ghost v9.0, which is a bootable CD.

Is the Norton Ghost 2003 CD not bootable?

Wishdiak
A+, Network+, Security+, MCSA: Security 2003

http://www.wishdiak.com

 

[GringoMcC]

Hi!

Try this link;

http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/started.html

I managed to create a bootable ghost 2003 CD from the documentation above. Adding drivers for USB or Firewire shouldn't be too difficult.

Just make sure you add the appropriate driver to your config.sys file. Enhanced host controller file for USB2, standard host controller if USB 1 only.

I haven't tried booting from an external USB 2 cd drive. The only issue I can think of (Off the top of my head) is that as it loads the USB driver, it *may* disconnect the CD-ROM drive leading to an 'inaccessable boot device' type error. I'd suggest looking in to creating a RAMDrive to load it in to first.

Failing this, I've successfully created a bootable Ghost USB key by using dos 7 bootable floppy disk, Ghost bootable floppy disks and HP's USB disk format tool. You do need a reasonable knowledge of DOS to pull it off. But it is possible!!

Regards,

Gringo

 

[CBear]

Thanks everyone for their input !!!

I was able to solve the problem. The bios on the computer had some crazy usb legacy support. I turned it off (ironically) and the cd I built worked.

Wow. go figure....

 

[ntfsDOTsys]

http://www.netbootdisk.com

A+, Network+, MCP
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My first computer was the Atari 400 (heh)