Ghost Using a bootable CDRom

I was wondering if anyone knew where I can find simple and easy to follow instructions on ghosting a machine via cdrom. I am looking for specifically on how to make a bootable cdrom adn also have the image on that same cd so that I can boot from it and it will reimage a machine. I was also looking through the Symantec ghost manaul and it wants me to copy a bunch of files to my burning software but I was unable to find two of them. Those files being IO.sys and MSDOS.sys. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

If you are going to burn directly to CD, you will do well for youself to verify each and everyone of the disks.

 

I use Ghost 2003 and the first CD of the spanned archive is made bootable automatically by Ghost. Follow the instructions in the Ghost wizard, leaving most settings as stock.
I recommend clearing out temp files etc and defraging the HD before making a backup. If you have a DVD burner you may be able to backup onto one disk. I've had little success backing up to DVD with Ghost so backup to about 4-5 CDR or CDRW's.
After the image has been transfered to the discs, use the verify option to check the images.
To boot from the discs make sure the boot order in BIOS is set to CDROM first, followed by the HD as the second option.

After the images have been verified, you can even boot the PC from the first CD disc and see if it starts the restore from image process. From there you can cancel to return to your current windows install. This will assure you the machine will boot to the Ghost backup, and failing a faulty image (that the verify function should have highlighted) you should have a successfull backup in waiting!

 

I use bootable discs all the time to rebuild machines at work. I have a ghost image for each type burned to a bootable DVD.

I use Easy CD creator 6 to create the bootable dvd (earlier versions will not do bootable dvd's, only cd's).I beleive nero 6 will also do bootable dvd's.

I have never tried using multiple spanned cd's but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in the same way.


The steps I use are:

1. run ghost on the machine and put the image on another hdd, partition or network location.

2. find a bootable floppy and edit the autoexec.bat file, adding the line "ghost.exe" to the end.

3. fire up your dvd writing software and select "create bootable dvd" using the floppy as the bootable image source.

4. add the ghost image to the disc and also a copy of your ghost.exe file from your ghost installation (the other ghost files are not necessary)

5. burn the files and you will have a bootable disc that goes straight into Ghost. (rebuilds a 2Gb image in around 5 minutes on my firm's machines).


Ghost has millions of switches that I have never investigated, but I expect it would be possible to automate the whole process from start to finish.

Hope this helps