Symantec Ghost 8.0 (Corporate Edition) with VIA VT8237

[MBreckenridge]

Hi,

I am looking to use Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corparate Edition with my computer.

But i am wondering, does anyone know if it will work with the VIA VT8237 SATA Controller, as this is what i use.

I cannot find any help on the Symantec Website.

Thank You,

Martyn

[Andromeda43]

Hi,

I am looking to use Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corparate Edition with my computer.

But i am wondering, does anyone know if it will work with the VIA VT8237 SATA Controller, as this is what i use.

I cannot find any help on the Symantec Website.

Thank You,

Martyn

Hi Martyn,

Just a quick question. Why are you focused on that particular version? Is this for home use or in a business/corp setting? And do you already own that program?

I use Ghost 2003, run from a boot floppy or CD, and it works fine with my SATA hard drives, my IDE hard drive and all my CD/DVD burners.

It will also back up a NTFS partition just as easily as a FAT-32 partition.

The only place I've not been able to get it to work right is on a PC using the new AMD 939 motherboard. On my SATA hard drive, doing a Ghost Backup with minimum compression, takes me only five minutes.

I've tried another popular backup program but have since deleted it from my computer. Just going through the pages of setup options took several minutes to complete and then the actual backup took over a half hour. What really made me delete that program was when I found it running in the background and trying to "Phone Home". I hate it when that happens

Good Luck,

Andromeda43 B)

Edited November 14, 2006 by Andromeda43

[MBreckenridge]

Hi Martyn,

Just a quick question. Why are you focused on that particular version? Is this for home use or in a business/corp setting? And do you already own that program?

I use Ghost 2003, run from a boot floppy or CD, and it works fine with my SATA hard drives, my IDE hard drive and all my CD/DVD burners.

It will also back up a NTFS partition just as easily as a FAT-32 partition.

The only place I've not been able to get it to work right is on a PC using the new AMD 939 motherboard. On my SATA hard drive, doing a Ghost Backup with minimum compression, take me only five minutes.

Good Luck,

Andromeda43

I was wanting to use this version as i have seen that once a restore image is created, all you need to do is pop the CD/DVD in and it will automatically restore the computer.

I tried Norton Ghost 10 but it wasnt as automatic.

Ta,

Martyn

[Andromeda43]

Right!

That is the whole idea of using Ghost in the first place.

The program that I use, (not ver. 8) Ghost 2003, will let you make a quickie backup to a HD or a much slower backup to a DVD. In my own case, I use Ghost from a floppy disk. (call me a throwback if you like)

When run in this manner, Ghost offers to put all the info from the floppy on the CD/DVD to make it bootable. Of course I just let it do that. Then indeed I do have a DVD that will boot up to my Ghost menu.

From there, I can do a restore to any HD I please. It's not a fully automated restore, but I always like to keep my options open. After all, it only takes a few mouse clicks to get the restore process started.

I don't like running Ghost from a GUI in windows. It's time consuming and the Ghost program itself just adds to the file bloat on the HD. I found having Ghost installed on my HD, to be redundant.

I hope you work out your own process for using Ghost. It's a very powerful program.

Cheers!

Andromeda43

[LLXX]

Ghost uses a mostly generic and standard method of accessing the disks, so unless your system has a very strange setup it should work fine.

[E-66]

Andromeda, maybe you can answer this for me, I see you've posted about Ghost 2003 in a couple threads today. I have an older version of Ghost from 2000, not even sure what it's called, maybe 'Personal Edition.' It doesn't work with XP so I got Ghost 2003 from a friend who never used it. The problem is, I can't get a boot floppy made. I'm feeling kind of dumb that I can't figure it out, but I can't.

When I start the Boot Wizard and try to make a 'standard' boot disk I run into 2 problems. If I try to use the PC-DOS option I can get to the screen where it shows you what the Autoexec.bat & Config.sys files are going to look like, but if I try to go to the next step I get an error message pop-up box: Cannot read the bootsector information - the file bootsect.dat is missing or corrupt. The Ghost Boot Wizard may need to be re-installed.

If I try to use the MS-DOS option, I put a formatted floppy in and get the message An error occured while trying to create the directory "COMMON\MSDOS"

Frustrated, I tried copying Ghost 2003's ghost.exe to a bootable floppy with Ghost 2000 and overwriting the 2000 version of ghost.exe. That didn't work - I ended up getting a message that "this copy of Ghost was unable to register."

Ugh! What do I need to do to get 2003 working?

[Andromeda43]

Andromeda, maybe you can answer this for me, I see you've posted about Ghost 2003 in a couple threads today. I have an older version of Ghost from 2000, not even sure what it's called, maybe 'Personal Edition.' It doesn't work with XP so I got Ghost 2003 from a friend who never used it. The problem is, I can't get a boot floppy made. I'm feeling kind of dumb that I can't figure it out, but I can't.

When I start the Boot Wizard and try to make a 'standard' boot disk I run into 2 problems. If I try to use the PC-DOS option I can get to the screen where it shows you what the Autoexec.bat & Config.sys files are going to look like, but if I try to go to the next step I get an error message pop-up box: Cannot read the bootsector information - the file bootsect.dat is missing or corrupt. The Ghost Boot Wizard may need to be re-installed.

If I try to use the MS-DOS option, I put a formatted floppy in and get the message An error occured while trying to create the directory "COMMON\MSDOS"

Frustrated, I tried copying Ghost 2003's ghost.exe to a bootable floppy with Ghost 2000 and overwriting the 2000 version of ghost.exe. That didn't work - I ended up getting a message that "this copy of Ghost was unable to register."

Ugh! What do I need to do to get 2003 working?

That's easy, you can copy Ghost.exe and mouse.com to a DOS formatted floppy disk and make your autoexec.bat file look like this:

@Echo off

cls

mouse.com

Ghost.exe

That's all you really need. Ghost will be much easier to use if you have the mouse drivers loaded before you actually run Ghost.exe.

I go one step further and boot into a Ansi-Color menu where I have several options to do some cleanup work before actually running Ghost. I use the same boot disk (with Windows ME's DOS on it, not Free Dos, Dr DOS or IBM DOS) on systems running DOS, Windows 95, 98, 98/SE, ME or XP.

I've had no reason to try it with Win-2k or NT, but I don't know why it wouldn't work.

I've used "Nero Burning Rom" to take the info from my boot floppy and make a Bootable CD, for those 'puters that don't have a floppy drive.

Or, since you already own the program I can offer you a copy of my own Ghost boot disk.(minus Ghost.exe)

Just add your Ghost.exe file, which you already own and you're good to go.

Drop me a PM for details.

Cheers!

Andromeda43

[E-66]

I finally got it working for the most part. My mistake was extracting the 2003 ghost.exe file from the .CAB file (called F2506_ghost.exe) and then renaming it to just plain 'ghost.exe' and trying to use it. Doing that was apparently the reason I got the "this copy of Ghost was unable to register" message. When I actually installed the program to my hard drive and then copied the ghost.exe to a bootable floppy it worked fine.

Still have one issue though. If I use the Boot Wizard to make a bootable floppy, it'll make one using the PC-DOS that comes with the program (and that floppy works fine), but I can't get it to make one with the MS-DOS system files, and I don't understand what I need to do to get that to work. It says to insert a Win95 or 98 system-formatted floppy. I do that (I think?) but then get a message that the MSDOS system files could not be found on the disk.

Which files is it looking for? I've used a formatted floppy with just command.com, io.sys, and msdos.sys on it, and I've also tried using a start-up disk made by Win98, but regardless of which I one use I get the same error message. What's the solution?

[TheFlash428]

Just thought I'd throw my method into the mix...

I too use Ghost 2003 and I store all my disk images to a network share.

I create a share on one of my servers, and copy the ghost.exe file into that share. I then boot to a TCP/IP network boot disk. Once the boot disk has run and I'm connected to my network in "DOS", I map a drive to my previously set up share and run Ghost.exe from there. Once ghost starts, I'm already mapped to my storage location where I can read or write and image to my hard-drive.

There are a few out there, but this is where I get the network boot disk I usually use:

Netboot Disk

It boots up, detects your network card and then calls on DHCP to assign an IP address; after that, everything else is easy, as instructions for mapping the drive are even echoed on the screen.

Looking for a way to write your image spans that you've saved to a network hard-drive to a bootable CD/DVD for restore purposes? Instructions are a little more involved, but send me a PM and I'll be happy to try and help.

[MGadAllah]

While I will not discus Norton Ghost,

But I'd like to suggest you using Acronis which will not let face any problems at all.

[jrf2027]

If you can't get Ghost 8.0 to properly back up your drive, you may want to give Image for Windows (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html) a try.

It does exactly what you want (allows you to back up to a DVD, insert the disk and it automatically restores). It's done everything I've wanted it to do, backing up a primary Windows partition to hard drive only takes about three minutes, and it costs less than $30.00.

Plus, you can try it out for 30 days before deciding whether to buy it.

(I will now remove my pimp hat.)

[E-66]

Andromeda, in your sample autoexec.bat file you have Ghost.exe following Mouse.exe. The boot floppy the Boot Wizard makes always creates a separate Ghost directory with the executable in it, thereby requiring the line 'CD Ghost' in the autoexec.bat. What's the purpose of doing it that way as opposed to having everything all in the same place?

Another question: Instead of having the Ghost executable on the floppy, is there any reason why you shouldn't run it from the hard drive itself after booting from the floppy? Just as an example, say your hard drive has 2 partitions, C: for the OS and programs, and D: for backup, ghost images, data, whatever.

You could have a Ghost directory on the D: drive with the executable in it, and then have the autoexec.bat look something like this:

@echo off

MOUSE.COM

D:

CD GHOST

GHOST.EXE

Is there any reason not to do it that way? The executable sure loads a lot faster running it off the hard drive.

Edited November 15, 2006 by E-66

[LLXX]

I finally got it working for the most part. My mistake was extracting the 2003 ghost.exe file from the .CAB file (called F2506_ghost.exe) and then renaming it to just plain 'ghost.exe' and trying to use it. Doing that was apparently the reason I got the "this copy of Ghost was unable to register" message. When I actually installed the program to my hard drive and then copied the ghost.exe to a bootable floppy it worked fine.

This is because it stores registration data in encrypted format in the last 2048 bytes of the file. If you compare your new version with the one from the install CAB you will find it differs.

[E-66]

Thanks, that was news to me and something I had no idea about. I think I know much more about computers and computing than the average person, but I still don't know very much, lol.

[TheFlash428]

Andromeda, in your sample autoexec.bat file you have Ghost.exe following Mouse.exe. The boot floppy the Boot Wizard makes always creates a separate Ghost directory with the executable in it, thereby requiring the line 'CD Ghost' in the autoexec.bat. What's the purpose of doing it that way as opposed to having everything all in the same place?

Another question: Instead of having the Ghost executable on the floppy, is there any reason why you shouldn't run it from the hard drive itself after booting from the floppy? Just as an example, say your hard drive has 2 partitions, C: for the OS and programs, and D: for backup, ghost images, data, whatever.

You could have a Ghost directory on the D: drive with the executable in it, and then have the autoexec.bat look something like this:

@echo off

MOUSE.COM

D:

CD GHOST

GHOST.EXE

Is there any reason not to do it that way? The executable sure loads a lot faster running it off the hard drive.

I'm sure you could do it that way--this would be similar to the way I run Ghost off a network drive. (I've never tried though).