Issues with P4C 800 Deluxe / SATA drive & Norton Ghost?

[Krusty]

Does anyone have any ideas or can they tell me if the following is normal
thanks:

Using a P4C 800 Deluxe board with a SATA drive (non raid) I can't use Norton
Ghost (2003) unless I firstly change the BIOS setting: Main> IDE
Configuration, from "Enhanced Mode" (Normal) to "Compatibility Mode"
(Temporary)?

The drawback doing this is that I can not write images directly to removable
media (CD-R/RW) as being at DOS level the CD drive does not appear in the
"Compatibility Mode". If I leave the IDE Configuration on Enhanced Mode then
Norton Ghost will not work as it can't see the hard drive (SATA) & locks up.

I therefore have to save the images to a Hard Drive Partition using the
Ghost Split = 650 switch to force the image to split into 650 Meg files. I
then later on (once Enhanced Mode has been restored) from Windows (XP) write
these images to CD-R/RWs making the first disk bootable (with GHOST.EXE in
the boot image). However as the CD or DVD & SATA drives can't co-exist at
DOS level a restore isn't possible from the CD or DVD disks!

It's an annoying work around & I thought that others may have solved the
problem by a BIOS setting though I have tried basically every setting there
is to no avail! I like the speed of the SATA drive but am seriously thinking
of giving it the flick & using a standard parallel drive!

Thanks in advance for any feedback or tips!

 

[Tim]

Hi there,

Are you saying that by changing the BIOS settings you can use Ghost 2003 to
read the SATA boot drive can it see any other SATA drives to copy the Ghost
image to and then can you Ghost back the Ghost image to the SATA boot drive?

I just thought Ghost didn't work on the SATA non raid drives so I use Casper
XP but if Ghost is going to work great.

Many thanks, Tim.

 

[Krusty]

Hi Tim,

Yes Ghost 2003 does work if you change to the BIOS to Compatibility mode
before saving the image to a partition (other than "C"). It's not the ideal
situation but works fine & is lightening fast. That is if you have GHOST.EXE
on a floppy drive or on a partition. BTW you can fit all of the necessary
files for Ghost 2003 on a single floppy disk 1.44MB you just remove the
unnecessary files. all that's needed is the boot files (COMMAND.COM,
CONFIG.SYS, IO.SYS, - MOUSE.COM & AUTOEXEC.BAT are optional). I also keep
CD-ROM drivers & FORMAT on the disk.

Ghost 2003 is much larger than V7.5 something like 750KB compared to 1MB so
you can stick with V7.5 if need be.

As a precaution I split the images at either 650MB or 700MB (using a Ghost
switch e.g.: GHOST -SPLIT=700 -auto) via batch files. Then copy the
resulting images to CD-R/RWs. I haven't yet needed to do a restore from the
CDs but there would be ways such as copy them to the hard drive then
restore).

I have done many restores (Ghost) from the partition without any problems
(Under Compatibility & not Enhanced)! You kind of confirmed my findings
about SATA drives, I thought it was maybe just an issue that I hadn't found
an easy fix for!

 

[Tim]

Hi there,

Yes I have Ghost 2003 on a FD so will try it tomorrow not bothered about
writing it to a CD or DVD disk as I have spare SATA drives to write the
image to just in case I need to recover using the Ghost image, suppose I
could write it to a DVD if needed.

I like Casper as you can write the total boot partition to another
drive/partition from windows even if the drives are in raid formation which
is quite handy, however I don't use raid at the moment so Ghost would be
easier.

Will let you know if I meet with problems, hope not.

Many thanks, Tim.