Ghost NTFS / sysprep issues??

[John Prophet]

Ok, I have ghost 7.5 corporate. I have used it 3.2 million times. On occasion I have had some issues...but normally it works great.

I am having a particular problem right now that I never had before.

Trying to clone a hard drive using "disk to image"..like Ive done many many times. I choose to put a bootable floppy on the cd etc, as usual...I choose either "high" or "fast" or even "none" for compression...but I am getting a particular "error".

First of all the data is like 1.7g. So I am expecting it to say "this backup will take about 3 cd's"..like it normally does....but it WONT say that...no matter which type of compression I am using. It just gets ready and says "proceed with backup".....as if it plans to put all 1.7g on that one lonely little cd.

Ok, I am using a IDE drive ive cloned before and also my trusty 32x verbatim drive which Ive used many times also.


And I also took the disk out of the PC Chips 810 machine and put it into a dell gx1 just to double check that....and I got the same behavior.


SYSPREP??

The ONLY thing I can think of is that I have never tried to clone to image after running sysprep on a machine. I have a fresh xp build..ran sysprep on it with the "extendoempartition=1" entered in the sysprep.inf file.


Is that why its screwing up???


I tried going disk to disk and it worked fine.


Do I even need the "extendoempartition=1" if I am using ghost anway?? cuz ghost fills out the hard drive in the first place.




Anybody ran into this before???

Thanks, JP

[muno]

So do you excatly have an error or what?
You say it doesn't want to spread it over 3 discs, but that isn't an error.

[John Prophet]

It fails every time I tried to write to cd...burns for a few minutes and fails. The error is in that it wants to put 1.7g on one cd.

[John Prophet]

something like "failed to write to cdr, if this continues call Bill gates at home"

[muno]

Did you call him?

I've never done ghost to a cdr, does it do it from dos? If so, that's impressive. I've always done the images to a network drive.

Have you tried manually forcing the split point?

[John Prophet]

u just boot off the ghost floppies...(a form of dos)...do "disk to image"...of course you have to have a cdburner. Then you can put a bootable floppy on the image also, it asks if you want to do that. I have a special floppy with a batch file...asks if you wanna restore image..you say "y" for yes..then type "agree" and it kicks off the restore process.

No, havent tried manual etc. Dont know how, besides I wanna find out WHY..so tomorrow I will change the sysprep.inf by taking out the "extendoempartition=1" line....and see whats up from there.

[DVNT1]

I'm not sure what's different, but Ghost has an option box/switch that allows spanning. Try checking that option.


(I never use Ghost images outside of the local hard drive or network drives, so I'm not familiar with using small media)

[John Prophet]

But Ive never had to use any kind of switch before...this is the same old ghost boot floppy Ive used forever..it usually spans automatically...it just prompts you first by telling how many cd's it thinks it will take....but with sysprep it wont prompt it just asks if you want to proceed....as if the 1.7g will actually fit, lol.



Of course now the sysprep is confusing me. How am I supposed to make a custom sysprep answer file so that I dont have to enter all the gay info when I boot. I dont want to be entering a comp name, time zone etc every time I ghost to a new comp.

Ok, I know when you run a sysprep it puts a syprep folder on the c: drive. In that folder is the sysprep.exe, sysprepcl and sysprep.inf file.

Ok, I know that THAT .inf file in that folder will be used when it reboots after running sysprep. Now, when you run sysprep the comp shuts off afterward..yes?? So how do you modify that sysprep.inf file? I did it somehow yesteday but cant remember how, lol..besides, whatever I did didnt work cuz there I was entering a product id again.

Why cant microsoft simply have step by step instructions that work??? really pees me off.

[DVNT1]

For what's it's worth, we don't even "install" sysprep on the machines. We just run it from the network drive or CD.

We also don't use an answer file so I can't relate to that part.

[John Prophet]

Well I got the span part working..by....uhh, err, simply checking the "span" box, lol.

Confused me (still) cuz I never did that before but I think all I ever did was fat32 images..and on those it would always just say "will take 2 cd's do you want to continue" or something like that.

So I checked "span" or auto span, whatever....and I started it all off and when it got to it again it didnt say "will take 2 cd's " etc..it just said "do you want to backup to cdr"..which is what it said everytime it failed...but I went ahead and , yes, it got halfway thru and kicked out the cd and asked for another.

So I am sooo glad I got that part working at least..the answer file I can live with or without, lol.

Thanks all, JP