Dave,
I am back again,
Just ran the USB format tool and installed those 4 files, also I have dropped Fdisk and Format on the flash drive as well and it boots into the flash drive ok and I can use Fdisk ok.
I am now setup for the next stage so when you are ready fire away.
Deric.
OK, here we go.
You'll need to have ready your 2 iso's. One for the Ghost 15 recovery disk and one for your Ghost 12 recovery disk.
Rename them to Ghost15.iso and Ghost12.iso while they are still on your computer, renaming them later can cause them to fragment and they need to be on the flash drive as one continuous file without any fragments.
Make a folder on your flash drive called "Portable Apps" inside that folder make another one called "Defraggler"
Go here and download to your desktop "Defraggler Portable" It's a free program but make sure you get the portable version.
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler/builds
Extract that zip file to your flash drive into the Portable Apps/Defraggler folder
Copy the Ghost 15 recovery iso to the root of the flash drive (not into any folders).
Then open the Defraggler folder and run "defraggler.exe"
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/5980/defrag1.jpg
On the top, select the flash drive and then click the "Analyze" button.
When it's done, select the tab that says "file list"
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/3200/defrag2m.jpg
If you see the Ghost15.iso listed, check the box next to it and then select "Defrag". It may take a while to defrag it.
If it's not listed, it's not fragmented.
Next repeat with the Ghost12.iso, copy it to the drive and run defraggler again and defrag the iso if necessary.
Trust me, it's quicker to do them one at a time then copying all the iso's onto the drive and finding you need to defrag any of them. If you have troubles and your flash drive is small, you may want to delete the iso's, defrag the flash drive and copy an iso back to the drive again.
Once you have those iso's on the drive without any fragments download grub4dos here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/
Extract that to a folder on your desktop and copy these files to the flash drive:
grldr, grub.exe, and menu.lst
Open up menu.lst in notepad and delete everything and replace it with this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
default 0
timeout 30
color cyan/blue white/blue
foreground ffffff
background 003f7d
title Start Ghost 15
map (hd0,0)/Ghost15.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot
title Start Ghost 12
map (hd0,0)/Ghost12.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot
title Boot to DOS
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)/io.sys
title Reboot
reboot
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't copy the lines m8, just everything in between them.
Save it and close notepad.
Open up disk management and look for the flash drive. In the bottom section see what Disk# is listed for it. You will see the drives listed as Disk 1, Disk 2 etc.
My flash drive is listed as Disk 4.
Download and extract this file to a folder on your desktop:
http://www.themudcrab.com/downloads/grubinst-1.1-bin-w32-2008-01-01.zip
Run the file grubinst_gui.exe
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/192/grubinstall.jpg
In the top box select the drive number and double check the size listed to confirm it is your flash drive.
BE VERY CAREFUL AT THIS STEP- You must be sure it is your flash drive, if your wrong here you will cause your system not to boot.
If your sure it's your flash drive, click the setting "dont search floppy:" and click "Install"
A command box pops up saying it has installed, you can close everything now.
Boot to the flash drive and Grub will load the menu.lst showing the boot choices.
When you select one of the iso's it will be just like booting to a CD, you'll have to "press any key" to boot to the "CD".
When you boot to DOS if you want to start Ghost 2003, just type: ghost
If it all works you now have a multi-booting flash drive with all your versions of Ghost to choose from.
Dave
I thought is was bad to defrag flash drives.
I built a multi boot flash drive using Easy BCD. Instead of ISO files, I use the WIM file from the Ghost 15 SRD. I think you can also add ISO files. I had problems at first, then after reading the forum, I found there was a problem that was fixed in a beta version. I downloaded version 2.0.2.112 and it works great. I now have three things on my flash drive that I can boot. I think the version they have now has this problem fixed. I'll try a new version if i need to create another bootable USB Flash drive.
redk9258 wrote:I thought is was bad to defrag flash drives.
Unfortunately it is essential for those ISO files to be fragment free to work with Grub4DOS
Brian_K wrote:Unfortunately it is essential for those ISO files to be fragment free to work with Grub4DOS
Man, if you didn't know that little secret, you'd have a heck of a time getting it to work.
Personally I think the whole thing about defragging flash drives or SSD's is a little overblown.
If you defrag a file on a flash drive, your really not putting it thorough any more "wear and tear" as deleting the file and writting a new one to the drive.
You make any changes to a file and it gets re-written, thats what a flash drive is for, files get written and re-written to the drive.
I agree you might not want to defrag a SSD on a daily basis but once in a while is not going to hurt. The read and write cycles on these drives now are such that your really not going to wear them out.
But thats just my opinion, If anyone is really concerned about it there is a way to load a semi-fragmented iso into memory and launch it from there but it seems to take longer and not improve the performance.
Dave
Edit- Red, easybcd uses "neogrub" it's grub that they have made some kind of chage to. It's basically the same method so either it needs the iso unfragmented or it's loading it into mem.
There was however something I either disliked or couldn't do with that version. I can't remember.
There is also a difference between grub and grub4dos and grub4dos has more capabilities.
I might be completely wrong but I don't think there is much reason to defrag flash or SSD drives. The access speed should be the same fragmented or not as opposed to a mechanical HDD that has to have the heads seek across the platters for the fragmented files on the HDD.
redk9258 wrote:I might be completely wrong but I don't think there is much reason to defrag flash or SSD drives. The access speed should be the same fragmented or not as opposed to a mechanical HDD that has to have the heads seek across the platters for the fragmented files on the HDD.
Your correct about the access speed. For that it shouldn't matter.
However don't forget about the NTFS journal and the file overhead. You split a large file into a thousand fragments your expanding the file allocation table to be able to record the "thousand piece" roadmap on how to find the file.
Dave,
I have just scanned through 7 replies to my last posting and it just about blew me away.
I don't want to get into the argument about fragmentation and because you have gone to the trouble of setting out the instructions in detail I am determined to crack this "booting with flash drives".
I will have to read it through a few times before I attempt the procedure but are you sure this is better than the trusty old floppy, 'cos this is mind boggling stuff especially after a few bottles of plonk 
There is one thing for sure I can guarantee I won't crack it on the first attempt so be prepared for a bit of overtime.
Deric
Dave,
I am part way there, I haven't got a Ghost 12 iso file see Capture 1 and Capture 2.
Can I just copy the files and folders off the Ghost 12 SRD?
I will carry on without G15 to see if it works.
Deric
Dave, I am getting there slowly, stuck on the Grub installer not "seeing" my flash drive see Capture 3 it only shows 0 and 1 my flash drive is 2
Deric
Deric
I know what I didn't do and that is rename the G15 iso but I keep it on my little portable drive (WD 40) see 1st post today. That shouldn't make any difference, I just dragged it onto the flash drive.
If you look on my portable you will see Ghost 2003 can I drag that on the flash drive?
I have rebooted and Grub4 Dos installer still can't see my flash drive.
On this machine C: drive is partitioned into 4 and I have a Data drive J: they are the only 2 physical drives on the machine now so in disk management they are listed as 0 and 1 and flask drive K: is 2.
It is still a multi boot with XP, Vista and Win 7 (1) and Win 7 (2).
Deric.
Dave,
All the work I have done on this bootable flash drive has been done on Win 7 and I have just tried Grub4Dos Installer on Win XP Pro and it can see my flash drives now so I will complete the process and see if it works.
According to that then the installer only works in XP and won't work in Vista or Win 7, I will check it out on Vista later.
Deric
Tried to run the programme in XP and I get this error so I still can't complete.
Deric
I see the installer sitting by it'self on the desktop.
Maybe it needs some of the other files in the archive. Try extracting the whole thing to a folder and running it from there.
Dave
Dave,
No it still won't work, I think that I will have to run the whole process from XP Pro, I might be wrong but I don't think XP can't read Win 7 notepad.
Leave it with me it's a bit late now so I will try it again tomorrow afternoon on XP Pro.
Deric
I downloaded the latest version of EasyBCD today. I was able to easily build a flash drive that boots .iso files. It looks like it uses part of grub to do the magic of booting from .iso files. It still uses the Windows bootloader.
All you have to do is plug in a formatted flash drive with your .iso files on it.
Open EasyBCD.
Click Bootloader Setup.
Choose the flash drive partition. (Don't pick the wrong partition!)
Click Install BCD.
It will automatically load the new BCD file from the flash drive.
Now click Add New Entry.
On the bottom part of the program box, it says Portable / External Media.
Click the ISO Boot tab.
Give the entry a name and browse to the .iso file on the flash drive.
Click Add entry.
Keep adding until all of your .iso files are added.
Now click Edit Boot Menu.
Set the order, time, default, etc. Then click Save Settings.
Now you have a multiboot USB flash drive.
A couple of notes... Ghost 10 blue screens on my PC because I don't have the correct SATA drivers on it. I don't have a floppy drive to add drivers and don't want to mess around with slipstreaming them in. The CD does exactly the same thing. Ghost 2003 boots into PC DOS, but since I do not have SATA drivers, it cannot see any drives. The CD is exactly the same. Ghost 15 boots and acts the same as the CD. So did a couple of other .iso files that I tried.
If you try this, good luck!
Red, Ghost 2003 does not need external drivers for SATA or NTFS. However it wasn't until the later versions that support for these were added and then improved. The last version released was build 793.
If you click the ghost.exe file inside windows, it won't run but it will generate a file ghosterror.txt in that same folder and the error file will show what build you have.
I seen a topic here about how to change the liveupdate onto the symantec archive server if your interested.
Deric,
I used XP for building most of my bootable flash drives.
However, I used to use this tool called MultiBootISOs from this site here:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/
I stopped using the tool from that site because I don't really like the new version, it makes a small hidden partition on the flash drive.
I still have the old version of the tool, if you send me an email address through a private message I'll send it to you if you still can't get the other installer to work.
It does the same thing, it just adds a couple extra files and empty folders you need to delete.
Dave
Dave,
I had to put my motherboard into IDE mode instead of AHCI. From the flashdrive I can load PC DOS, but cannot find the "CD" that is in the ISO file that contains the SUPPORT folder with ghost.exe in it. In PC DOS, I tried to load CD drivers and then the USB drivers. I can see the ISO files on the flash drive, just not the "CD" in the ISO file. I'm sure that ghost.exe would run if I put it on the root of the flash drive.
When I boot the real Ghost 2003 CD, loading CD drivers in PC DOS, I can find the SUPPORT folder and run ghost.exe.
So, when you run the Ghost 2003 ISO from a flash drive, is it modified? What drivers do you load from the PC DOS menu?
Thanks.
Dave,
I have run the whole procedure from Win XP Pro (and to be honest I still prefer XP) but I still get the same error message as before, could it be that the problem is with my Ghost 15 ISO file because I have tried RedK's version and that fails too.
Grub4 Installer cannot see my flash drive in Vista just thought I would let you know.
As I have said before I did manage to produce 2 bootable flash drives months ago and I can use those to install Win 7 and Win Vista. To make those bootable I used "HP- USB Disk Format Tool" and that worked a treat, then to finalist it I think I used "Diskpart". or some tool like that.
I can't be sure because my notes are at my eldest daughter's at the moment.
Deric
