Ghost 8.0 and CD support

[Caustic]

I'm having a problem with the newest version of Ghost from symantec. Our new desktop PCs (Dell Optiplex GX270) don't have floppy drives and Ghost8.0 does not support creating boot CDs for the purpose of multicasting.

Symantec's advice is to create a bootable floppy using "3rd party" software. Aside from that they don't offer any more information.

I have created floppies from the Ghost Boot Wizard. It creates two floppies. The first contains a net folder with drivers (intel PRO 1000), netbind and protman and the second disk contains the ghost executable. I then used Nero to create a bootable CD-ROM and added the files from the floppies.

When I boot off the new CD, it fails attempting to run netbind with this error:

LAN Manager v2.1 Netbind
Error: 7906 Unable to open Protman$.

Of course, I can manually run Ghost from the CD, but without the NIC initialized, its pretty much useless.

Has anyone run into the lack of floppy support in Ghost? Did you find a solution? Do I need to make changes to the files created for the floopy when they are transferred to CD?

Thanks for any information.

 

[ReddLefty]

The Optiplex GX270's support USB boot up. Dell was currently having a promotion that gave 64M Memory USB Keys free (you had to choose the selection). Most 2002-2003 systems can boot up with USB now.... I simply transferred my 30 diskettes with 20 types of network cards into one USB bootable memory key. No more hauling disks, loosing them or bad CRCs.

But, to get back to your original problem, you can't create a boot disk with your average diskette cause the DOS versions of a network boot up needs to write information as it boots the network stuff.. since you can't, it gives you an error.



"In space, nobody can hear you click..."

 

[micropolo]

It might be worth looking in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to see where its looking for the protman file, it may be looking in a folder which isnt there (as it still thinks it is on a floppy).

 

[Caustic]

Thanks for the replies.

We actually have USB microdrives on order. I'll try that when they get in. Did you have to modify anything (eg. autoexec)?

I didn't know the Dells supported boot from USB. I see it in the BIOS now. Thanks.

I assumed the problem with the CD was because it wasn't able to write back data. I thought by including RAM drive in the boot that I could get around it.

Yes, I will check the autoexec.bat and config.sys for a path referencing the floppy.

Again, thanks for the responses.

 

[jimv2502893]

Just create a network ghost boot disk, see the manual that came with your software for instructions.

 

[mfryguy]

micropolo is right, I would add that you can create both a CD/DVD boot disk set, as well as a Network boot disk set appropriate for the Network interface card installed on the clients the Network boot CD will be used upon. These disk sets can be made through the ghost boot wizard. Combind the autoexec.bat's and config.sys through some tiring re-writing of the batch scripts so that you have one bootable floppy that both loads the network drivers and CD-rom drivers to access the data region of the CD. In the data portion of the CD copy the Ghost.exe file for it to load. Anything that needs to be loaded from the config.sys file in either floppy disk set will need to be on the floppy disk used to make the bootable CD and anything else can be place into the data portion of the CD if properly driver lettered mapped.

 

[PZGuy]

I had the same problem too.. I created a CD bootable image with Nero from a windows 95 disk and added the modified autoexec.bat and config.sys file I got from the 2 ghost netwok boot disk. The problem was that when I booted with the CD, the files in the Net directory fail to load. From reading your last post, I'll try to add the files in the Net directory into the floppy disk befor I make create a boot.img. Please let me know if this would solve the the problem.