Ghost Boot CD with USB Support?

[Will Rickards]

So I've got Ghost 2003 and I need to create a boot CD with USB support. Only problem is I don't have a floppy drive so I can't create a floppy disk first and then get the image. So anybody have one of these or know how to create one. I can create a ghost bootable cd no problem. I just need to get usb support so I can image the failing drive to an external usb drive.

 

[MaxBurn]

There are a couple utility CD's that run around the news groups by the name of emergency repair disk (ERD) or Hirens boot CD and others. I "think" the latest Hirens boot CD has USB support for all its apps. Worth a shot anyway. All of these support CD's include ghost and partition magic (floppy disk boot versions) along with some other utilities that will do the job. They are of course illegal as heck because they contain a LOT of utilities that are not licensed or open source, but if you own the stuff you are using you can feel good about it as you just need their handy way of packaging it.

 

[Mercutio]

If you want to ghost to a USB drive, be SURE it's a brand name model (Seagate, Maxtor), and expect it to take 5 - 10x longer than going ATA - ATA.

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I followed directions I found earlier and managed to make a bootable ghost cd with usb support. To do that I added two files to the boot image and moved the ghost executable to the main cd part.

 

[Will Rickards]

While this nice CD worked in the designated PC.
It does not work in mine because my USB keyboard and mouse aren't functional. So it boots fine but I can't do anything!

 

[Mercutio]

Most PCs have an USB compatibility mode for keyboards under DOS.

 

[Mercutio]

... er, in the BIOS. Whoops.

 

[Will Rickards]

There were two entries labeled usb keyboard and usb mouse in the bios (I had checked yesterday). They were both set to enabled. So I don't think it is a bios setting unless there is another one I should look for?

 

[sechs]

If your BIOS doesn't have legacy keyboard support, then it's going to be hard to get by without a PS/2 keyboard.

A USB mouse is a different story. I've seen drivers that emulate it to PS/2, but I have no idea where that was.

 

[Will Rickards]

Here is the motherboard manual. I don't see any other option than what has already been set.

Unfortunately the PS/2 ports don't work.
They work for a bit when the computer boots up but after a while all the lights come on (caps lock etc) and the keyboard doesn't work anymore. I'm not sure what caused this problem but I just switched to the USB port and didn't think too much about it.

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I upgraded the bios from F4 to F5 and now it says legacy next to the USB keyboard option. So I loaded the defaults and then set everything the way I want.
Then I booted with the disk and pushed F8 to do step by step.
If I don't load the panasonic usb drivers, the keyboard and mouse work.
If I do, they don't. So it is definitely the driver. It might be an option like only use OHCI or EHCI or something.

Also another interesting thing.
While I was able to format this 160GB drive as FAT32 in an external enclosure with mkdosfs for windows, and was able to write to it with ghost, and verified the images with ghost. A day later all I got was gibberish when doing a dir command and it said the FAT table was corrupt. All with no writing to the drive being done?!? So my backups are well gone. Not sure whether it is the greater than 137GB thing or the enclosure chipset or what.

It works fine formatted NTFS over firewire connected to my main machine so back it goes. Which means now I don't need the panasonic drivers, I need the firewire device drivers. Anybody want to create a ghost 2003 boot floppy disk with those and tell me what files/commands are needed in config .sys/autoexec.bat?

I'm out of CD-Rs so I won't be able to test a new boot cd.
I'm thinking about trying to make my USB flash drive bootable and trying that as it is rewritable.

 

[CityK]

Well I upgraded the bios from F4 to F5 and now it says legacy next to the USB keyboard option. So I loaded the defaults and then set everything the way I want.
Then I booted with the disk and pushed F8 to do step by step.
If I don't load the panasonic usb drivers, the keyboard and mouse work.
If I do, they don't. So it is definitely the driver.

That mirrors my experience:

Getting it to work in DOS was fun (sarcasim). If you enjoy hours of editing config.sys/autoexec files, creating boot images, rebooting and changing BIOS settings), then USB HDDs and DOS will likely find a special place in your heart. It appears the available USB mass storage DOS drivers are highly sensitive to memory managers and BIOS usb emulation settings. If anyone is actually interested in this particular subject, I now have a slew of links which should send you well on your way.

The slew can be found here.

FWIW, I found the Duse driver was the best of the lot. I can take a look at my usbboot.img later on, if you like, to see how I set it up.

 

[sechs]

Does Ghost 2003 come with ghost32?

You may be able to use a miniNT environment instead of DOS. As long as you don't mind working with CDs instead of floppies, this would alleviate a lot of issues.

 

[Will Rickards]

no ghost32.

I got some help at the radified forums about how to add firewire support.
That is what I have the drive hooked up with now.
I have yet to test it though, no blank cds.
Can I just overwrite the files on the existing boot cd?
Or does that screw up the bootable part?

I'm most concerned now with the 137GB limitation.
Is this an issue? My backup drive is 160GB.

 

[CityK]

Can I just overwrite the files on the existing boot cd?
Or does that screw up the bootable part?

No. First off, if a disc has been finalized, you can't add anything to it. Now in the case of a boot CD, in order for the el torito method to work, the disc needs:
- a "Boot Volume Descriptor" located at the 17th sector
- a pointer in the Boot Volume Descriptor the marks the first sector of the Boot Catolog (i.e it provides the starting address of the Boot Catalog)
- a Boot Catalog that defines what type of boot image you have (i.e. 1.44MB floppy, 2.88 MB floppy, hard disk ...). T
- a pointer in the Boot catalog that marks the starting address of the bootable image

I'm most concerned now with the 137GB limitation.
Is this an issue? My backup drive is 160GB.

I'm not sure.

 

[CityK]

in order for the el torito method to work, the disc needs:

What I described is emulation mode.

You could also look into el torito booting with no emulation mode, via isolinux. Awesome for your multiboot needs.

 

[mangyDOG]

These may help:

Ghost with USB1.1 & Firewire Support Floppy Image File.

Ghost with USB2 & Firewire Support Floppy Image File.

WinImage for putting the image files onto a floppy.

If you use Roxio EasyCD creator to make a bootable CD and use one of these floppies as the "template" disk you can make bootable cds.

I have configured the boot setup to run ghost at maximum compression and to split the file into 930mb chunks (5 to a single layer dvd). You can edit the autoexec file to change this to 700mb if you want cd sized chunks.

I have found that the USB drivers don't work with all nForce4 chipsets but seem to be OK with all VIA chipsets once you have disabled Legacy USB support in the bios. The USB2 drivers do work well with most decent USB PCI cards I have tried so you can always stick one of these in the PC to run the backup and then pull it out again. Firewire support is also a bit hit and miss, works with most but not all chipsets I have tried.

I have also found that this version of ghost is happy to write to drives over 160Gb but seems to choke if you try to backup partitons bigger than this (not sure of the exact size that problems occur).


Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[Will Rickards]

Thanks, I'll try them out when I get some blank cd media.

 

[mangyDOG]

These are bootable floppy images, so if you have a floppy drive you can use them straight away, just takes a bit longer to load...

Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I never got around to trying the things as I decided to take a different route for backups. I got an IDE Drive Rack and put the backup drive in there.