WinPE, USB HD and Ghost for backup.

[anastasiosm]

Hi all,

I have got winpe, ghost 2003 and 9 and an external usb hard disk.
I wish to use these to go on customers' pcs and backup their systems.
Is there any working way to achieve this? Please provide me some info
if you have got any.

I recently created a ghost 2003 bootable cd that was loading usb
drivers for the hard disk but about half the times I used it, the drive
was not loaded (this was an issue of dos usb (o/u/e hci) drivers). The
drivers I tried are:
* Iomega ASPI USB O/U/E HCI (aspiehci.sys, aspiohci.sys and
aspiuhci.sys)
* Panasonic ASPI USB O/U/E HCI and the
* USBASPI Generic driver

I also had used ghost 9 (bootable cd) however this was consuming too
much memory until be loaded it was taking ages especially when target
pcs were old.

With Ghost 2003 I could run from windows the "run ghost interactively"
however this prerequisites to install ghost 2003 in customers' pcs
which we do not want to.


Another proposed solution to take images of hdd to external usb drivers
it would be using knoppix or any live open source software. I have
tried it with knoppix and it worked.

Additional solutions it would be the BartPE cd with Ghost 8, I have not
tried this yet; however my supervisor would prefer a microsoft
approach, using winpe and ghost 2003 or 9.

If you have any experience with the winpe and ghost method or any other
please let me know.

Thank you very much in advance!

 

[Michael Niehaus [MS]]

You may want to take a look at the Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop
Deployment, Standard Edition. The lite-touch deployment scripts included
with the solution accelerator are designed to use Ghost (Ghost32.exe, the
32-bit corporate edition, as Windows PE doesn't support 16-bit code) and
Windows PE 2004. Windows PE should have the necessary USB storage drivers
(assuming Windows XP SP2 has them - worst case, you need to add them to
Windows PE using the process described in the PE documentation).

-Michael Niehaus
Senior Consultant
MCS US Centers of Excellence - Deployment AOS
(e-mail address removed)
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Jetro]

If there is a problem with USB drivers using Ghost only, most likely there'd
be more problems if WinPE would be involved.