Norton Ghost, SATA drive, boot disk, boot cd

I had trouble getting Ghost to work with a 250 GB WD SATA hard drive on a new system with an Intel chipset. The ghost boot disks would load the disk operating system files, either pc dos or windows dos, and then Ghost would hang and never finish loading.

Per Symantec support site I found a work around by using a switch in the autoexec.bat file on the boot disk. The line and switch are:
ghost.exe -NOIDE (there are no IDE hard drives)

This works and I can make an image and save it to a separate partition. However, that switch kills the ability to use any IDE components such as CD-DVD RW drives.

There's another switch: -FNI which disables direct IDE access support for IDE hard disk operations, and retains use of CD-DVD drives, but Ghost still hangs if use this switch.

Imaging and saving to a partition is not a problem, and I can restore the image that is saved on the other partition. The problem is:

If I burn this image to a CD, how do I get the image restored? There does not seem to be any way to make a bootable Ghost CD or DVD because of this SATA problem.

I guess I could make a boot CD w/ DOS that has added apps like xxcopy and ghost, and copy the image from the CD to a partition, and afterward run ghost with the -NOIDE switch. If I made such a boot DVD, I suspect I could customize the autoexec.bat to run smartdrv & xxcopy which copies the image to the partition prior to loading ghost.

Any ideas?

 

I have no experience on a system with a single SATA. Ghost 2003 works fine on a system with a SATA as boot drive and a PATA to receive the image.

What are the settings in BIOS for the "empty" IDE channel(s)?

If AUTO, try setting it to NONE.

Christer

 

I forgot:

As I understand it, the -FNI switch doesn't disable harddisk support, it just forces PIO mode.

Christer