Even with the latest update, Ghost 2003 may refuse to boot from a floppy due to the system having a SATA drive. When searching for advice on how to deal with this problem, you’ll find a ton of results that range from getting new USB drivers for DOS to using the -NOIDE switch.
I ran into the same problem others were having; Ghost would boot and detect my USB drive and then hang. Using the -NOIDE switch didn’t help and the -FNI didn’t help either. I opened the CONFIG.SYS file on the floppy and put REM in front of “DEVICE = usb\aspiehci.sys /int /all”. Ghost would now boot without any problems. The internal SATA drive was even detected. However, the USB drive would no longer show up. So, the problem was getting my USB drive that contained my image to show up in Ghost. The solution turned out to be rather simple.
As test, I plugged in a USB flash drive and booted off of the floppy with the above change. Low and behold, the USB flash drive was available along with the internal SATA drive. My work would have been done at this point but my disk image was too large to fit on the 2GB flash drive. I was lucky enough to have another USB drive lying around and transferred the image to it. It was detected by Ghost and I transferred the image to the drive.
The solution:
- Open the “CONFIG.SYS” on the Ghost boot disk and modify the line to read “REM DEVICE = usb\aspiehci.sys /int /all”
- Find a flash drive or another USB drive that will be detected in Ghost with the above change in place.
It’s a low-tech approach that may not work for everyone but it may help some.
Update: I still work with Ghost on a regular basis to restore and deploy systems. I have found Ghost 10 to be the best version of Ghost that Symantec has ever released. The Ghost 10 CD is bootable and contains the necessary requirements to boot even the latest hardware. This includes systems with SATA drives and external USB drives. The best part about Ghost 10 is the fact that it contains the last release of Ghost 2003. This means you get the benefits of a great boot CD and the ability to still work with your legacy disk images. Sadly, Symantec removed the older version of Ghost from the boot CD in subsequent releases after Ghost 10.
I’ve been searching for a remedy for Ghost 2003 and SATA drives for months and months. NOBODY had come up with a solution, and suggested buying 7.5, 8, 9, 10. And now with a bootable jumpdrive with the files from Ghost floppy (with your REM) on it, I’m able to boot to dos with ghost. THANKS A MILLION–CAN’T BELIEVE NO ONE ELSE HAS MENTIONED YOUR SOLUTION ON ANY OF THE SEARCH FOR GHOST AND SATA.
You are a frickin genius! Thanks for posting this. –BG
I had sort of the same problem trying to back up a stupid laptop to an external usb drive. It turns out the external drive was formatted NTFS instead of fat32. Ghost 2003 can do external usb and do NTFS, but not both at the same time. Formatted the drive as fat32 and everything works, usb mouse and all. Hope this helps somebody else.
SATA issues were supposedly fixed with ghost 2003.793
version, if yours is .789 or lower that might be it.
I need to test these out for myself but I like what Im seeing - thanks a million for this post . This remedy covers a lot more ground than many people realize.
Thanks Frank.
Fantastic piece of advise, many thanks. What would we do without Google searches!
I have been searching for the remedy for a long time but now it’s working. Thanks to you man. Great knowledge ! Keep up the good work and Goodluck…