Hi, What I want to do is to ghost computers with a 2gb USBDrive. We wanted to ghost some computers without carrying the whole Ghost server.

Sounds easy but I had some problems.
First, it worked perfectly in USB 1.0 wich is too slow for our needs.

I found the USB 2.0 Dos driver and i'm able to load it. After that, it needs another file to give back a letter to the Drive but it change the drive letters and the booting stops there.

I got a solution somewhere wich was to Make a virtual drive to put the content to boot, switch to this drive to complete the booting before loading the USB 2.0 driver.

However, if i boot from a floppy it works well but we only want to carry the little usb drive.

Here's the problem. The virtual drive takes too much memory so there's not enough to load ghost.exe or even the mouse driver. I'm not too familiar with the hymem.sys and these things so I would like to have some help please.


btw, the transfer of the image is very fast on our new gigabit network:)
It also work very well to boot from a DVD with the switches to start everything automatically. It's also very fast.

format your pendrive and give it a dos boot. put these files :
* XMSMMGR.EXE (replacement of himem.sys)
* SMARTDRV.EXE (drive cache)
* norton ghost
* Harddisk Image you're going to clone

Boot with this pendrive and run xmsmmgr.exe, smartdrv.exe and start ghosting.

But I don't recommend using a pendrive, it's slow.

put hiren on the usb (http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk):

it contains:

Disk Clone Tools

ImageCenter 5.6 (Drive Image 2002)
Best software to clone hard drive

Norton Ghost 11.0.1
Similar to Drive Image (with usb/scsi support)

Acronis True Image 8.1.945
Create an exact disk image for complete system backup and disk cloning.

Partition Saving 3.50
A tool to backup/restore partitions. (SavePart.exe)

COPYR.DMA Build013
A Tool for making copies of hard disks with bad sectors

people who start using hiren will not stop anytime soon... it contains so many great useful utilities

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

let me hear if anybody agrees

Norton 14 drive copy,Change Drive Letters???
Booting With A USB Drive ( Pen )

HP Laptop with two drives, 2nd for documents etc. Win Vista Ult

1st drive full, so used Norton14 drive copy on to a usb drive. Now with drives swaped around, the drive in laptop (labeled as G:) boots a follows. 1) logon screen, 2) Preparing Desktop and then 3) a blank desktop (blue in color). And that's it.

Now when I also hook up the usb drive (which now contains the old C: drive) we boot up just fine because we now have the drive defined as drive C: connected to system.   

How do we change the drive letters with out hoseing everything up.

I dont think so it is possible but as we all know they are number of mad genius people in the world who are ready to try new things so i dont this that its impossible.........
but if any one knows please let me also know
thank you very much

Before a year or so, I was trying to Ghost the computer with a USB drive. I tried my level best to do it Myself but ultimately I didn't succeed. I was looking for someone who Can fix for me and I found a PC Repairs in sheffield(UK). They fixed It for me at a very reasonable rate and I was satisfied with their Work.

 

-reply by ruselrones03

Of course, please remember that you need to buy a Norton Ghost license for each computer you want to backup/restore.
Besides that, you should try an alternative to Ghost. It's name is CloneZilla, http://clonezilla.org/
It's free, and it works really well. As usual it has a LiveCD version, and it comes with it's USB flashkey generator, si you can easily install it on your USB flashdisk.
Of course, you have to choose your backup/restore plan from the beginning, you backup with CloneZilla and you restore with CloneZilla.
If you have a home network, you put a windows system as fileserver or a Linux NFS fileserver for holding your backups.
You boot on your CD or USB, you give the IP address of your fileserver, and it puts the backup on the server.
In case of crash, same thing, you boot on USB or CD, you give the IP address of your fileserver and you restore from your server.
Of course, if you want to help your friends, you can also put the backup on a USB external disk.
It's free, and while booting it you can notice that the LiveCD is a standalone Linux system.
This is the butyful aspect of the open software world, free and very powerful tools based on linux standards, but able to backup a Linux or a Windows system.
Regards
Yordan