Question : Running Norton Ghost 8 using a USB Hard Drive

I have a bunch of images from ghost that I use to rebuild PC's all the time for my company. I've used a flash drive to boot into dos and into ghost using a bare IDE drive without any issues at all. For the longest time I wanted to get that drive into an enclosure to protect is and to not wear out the ide port. The problem I'm having now is I cannot get the usb drive to be detected. I did some research and found that version 8 did not support usb hard drives so I was able to find just the dos version of 8.3 with the usb dos drivers. I still can't get the drive to be recognized. I just about tore my hair out yesterday trying different ways/configurations/altering the autoexec.bat to get it to work but with no success. I really don't want to continue to use a bare drive to extract the images. Does anyone here possibly know of a solution that could work for me?

Thanks very much in advance

Answer : Running Norton Ghost 8 using a USB Hard Drive

Excellent question! I am thinking about using USB hard drive to store images but my plan is a bit different from what you are doing.

At the moment I have a USB key that I have created for multibooting. I attaching the manual how to do it. Besides of the different LINUX distros and WinPE one of the DOS floppy images is used to boot to PS-DOS and run Ghost. The floppy was created with Ghost Boot Wizard - the trick was to create a short / text file named ghost.exe and point out Wizard to it. The actual Ghost.exe won't fit to floppy so it is located directly on USB (along with all other Ghost stuff).

Then I used WinImage to convert real floppy to image (that is being loaded completely to RAM by SYSLINUX).

I am booting PC from USB key. Floppy Image is A: drive, the USB key is recognized as C: drive. Hard drive in PC is identified as drive number 2 (from Ghost point of view). So I am launching Ghost from this C: drive (which in fact is just USB). Everything works like a magic :)

Hope it helps.

Guide-for-Multi-booting-from-a-U.pdf (1.3 MB) (File Type Details) 

Guide