Long Ghosting Time

[Guest]

Hi,

I’ve got an image I’m happy with, it uses EWF, (IDE to IDE), System cloning,
and other than that it’s just drivers and standard o/s components.

For some reason it take Ghost 40 minutes to copy the gold image. Is there
any particular reason for this? It just seems a huge amount of time.
Considering that other images that are basically the same take a matter of
only a few minutes to clone. Has anybody else noticed this, or know how I
might be able to speed up the ghosting time?

Thanks,
Rob

 

[KM]

Rob,

By the copying time do you mean just the time for capturing the image with Ghost, or expanding the image file to new media, or the
time when the cloned image coming up from the first boot?
If not latter - that would be only Ghost problem and not XPe related. Let us know if that was the image boot time, then there are
probable some issues with the cloning/EWF and we would need to hear more details from you on your image implementation and cloning
process you used.

 

[Guest]

By copying time I mean the actual ghosting process, so capturing the image
and copying it to a new drive. The master contains around 400Mb of data when
sealed, but still takes 40 mins to copy. If the disk was full of data I would
understand, but there’s 400Mb of data in a 15Gb drive space and a second
partition of 45Gb (for EWF overlay data) that should be empty at the time of
cloning (EWF is disabled until post clone). It is ghost performing slowly
because the EWF partition is acting a bit strange, or is it down to the fact
that the EWF is full of data, possibly something to do with the way that EWF
maps its data?

Failing that are there any switches that I can use to put in Ghost that will
speed things along a bit?

Thanks.

 

[KM]

Rob,

I don't know any switch of Ghost that will speed up the process. Also, if it is there, it would depend on the Ghost software
version. IIRC, there were too many changes between v8 and v9, for example.

Ghost does not know anything about EWF or the partition content it is reading or writing.
What is the size of result GHO file in your test? I am certain that with 256-512M it won't take more than a few minutes. Unless you
hardware media is extremely slow and damaged. Did you check it with.. Disk Checker or something like that? Try use chkdsk on it to
see if anything is wrong there.

 

[Guest]

The disks are fine and both are decent speed Western Digital disks. I've
tried reducing the overlay size and the ghost time shrinks dramatically. I
can only assume that the file format that EWF uses causes ghost some
confusion, so in a 40Gb overlay it copies all 40Gb as raw blocks.

I guess a fix to this would involve using FAT32 or NTFS for the partition,
hopefully Ghost would then be able to copy the drive more efficiently.

Since that's not an option I have, is there a way that I could create the
partition post cloning. So in theory, I could delete the partition, seal the
image, then boot the disk, create the parttion, enable it and then use the
disk? I guess this would vastly improve the ghost time, but I'm not sure if
it's possible.

Rob

 

[KM]

Rob,

Since you are talking about FS, files and etc (content), you must be using Ghost v9, right?
I'd rcommend you to switch to Ghost v8 which does the media binary copy bit-by-bit.

What partition were you talking about? If it is just a regular partition, you can easy create it post cloning (diskpart, Disk
Manager, etc.)
Or is it EWF Config Partition? It may still be possible to create it post FBA but you would need to do some manual steps after the
cloning.

KM

PS. Btw, what type of EWF you are using? If it is RAM based EWF, any change for you to evaluate EWF RAM Reg Mode? Then you wouldn't
need the EWF Config partition at all.

 

[Guest]

Yes it's the EWF Partition, running some steps post clone is not an issue,
there's a test app script that checks for things like the FTP service running
and does some other bits, so i could build the ewf stuff into that. What are
the steps that I'd need to do? How complex are these steps? Could you give me
some pointers?

Thanks for your help,
Rob

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Rob,

I would suggest you:
1. Do FBA and your stuff.
2. Delete EWF partition. (Or disable EWF partition creation during the FBA
you can do that in TD on EWF component in resources)
3. Ghost your disk.
4. After cloning is done follow MS doc about hot to manualy recreate EWF
partition. Basicaly you should use the call that you have disabled in step
2.

No EWF paritition during the copy equal no problems with ghost.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Rob,

As I said, I'd suggest you to evalutate the EWF RAM Reg for your image. It may save you some time on deployment as you won't have a
headache dealing with EWF Config partition.
Anyway, if you still want to have the EWF Config volume, just have it disabled while FBA'ing, resealing and cloning (so, no EWF
Config partition is there) and then enable it after the cloning (rundll32 ewfdll.dll ConfigureEwf).

More detail steps you wil get from here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...esignconsiderationsforusingewfwithcloning.asp

 

[Guest]

I've found two good / fast ways to ghost system images. The first method
uses a bootable cdrom called G4U (Ghost for Linux). It's a no-cost solution
and downloadable from http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/. You burn a bootable CDROM
image, boot the disc, and use the uploaddisk and slurpdisk utilities to
read/upload and write/download a copy of your disk image. The storage medium
is any FTP server you want.

The second method is dd, which can be found on the UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot
CD for Windows - http://ubcd4win.com/). This disc is an enhanced version of
BartPE, which is an enhanced verion of WinPE... which came with your XP
Embedded Studio disc set. Burn the ISO, boot the disc, open a cmd shell, and
use a command similar to:

dd if=zartition1\Image0001 ibs=1500b of=\\.\i: obs=1500b

The command above copies the image of a partition, from a mounted share, to
a formatted partition designated as I:. reversing the if and of designations
would have made a copy of the partition to the server. The critical piece
here is the block size. It should closely match the network MTA size. If it
doesn't, the defaults can make an 8 minute effort take literally hours.

HTH -

-Darren-

 

[Guest]

We did so by doing following:

* After you're ready for cloning commit the data from the overlay to the
protected volume and reboot
* Disable EWF and reboot again
* Delete the overlay partiton
* In the registry locate the key HKLM\CurrentControlSet001\Control\Windows
Embedded\FBA\4293... (there is only one that starts with 4293) and change the
value "FBAWasHere" to 0 (zero) -> instructs FBA to re-create the
overlay-partition
* Run FBRESEAL and clone your image before Windows restarts
* After you made your ghost-image let windows start again, when FBA has done
it's job and windows has started you'll see that the overlay partition was
created again

Good luck.
MR XPeApplicator@BE