I had this problem a few months ago on an XP box at the office while trying to image a PC with Ghost 8.0. A vendor upgraded some software and I tried to take an image of the HD afterward, but Ghost kicked out after I selected, “start w/emm386” or something to that effect. The screen displayed, “XMS alloc error”, and dropped in the R:\ directory in DOS. I tried a few more times and eventually blew it off and moved on - I had more important stuff to worry about at the time. This weekend, I just tried to re-image my personal desktop after upping my RAM from 1.5Gb to 3.0Gb and got the same “XMS alloc error” message about . Both work and home PC’s gave me the same error and I had sucessfully imaged each of them prior to the latest error. After some internet searching, I discovered this fault might be related to a 2Gb DOS barrier or something like that. I think the vendor added memory, but I cannot be sure. How can I work around this? Pulling a stick of memory to make an image is not a solution. I appreciate any suggestions you may have.
I want to add that I tried to image the box at work again and wrote down the exact message that I got back which was:
"** XMS RAMdisk v1.91 (FU-08/98): XMS get free mem error."
I don't know if this helps any more or less, but I'm certainly open to any and all suggestions or comments.
Hi Chrisrogers,
Welcome to the forum. I don't think there is going to be another way around this except to reduce the memory. It is just simply too old a program.
Have you considered upgrading to Ghost 15? Ghost 15 has reinstated the ability to do a COLD backup directly from the recovery environment which many users have asked for.
You would still have Ghost 8 to access the .gho images should you need it but after you've performed a number of backups with Ghost 15 you would no longer need the older backup images.
Allen
Haha. I joked with a collegue that the only solutions I would get on this site would be to upgrade to the newest version of Ghost. I see the files on the disk are dated 2004 so it's hard for me to believe 2Mb was not commonly used on Mobo's.
Chris,
Would you like to try this? Make your own bootable DOS CD containing ghost.exe (Ghost 8 version). Have no ram drive and comment out the EMM386.EXE line.
A custom Ghost 8 CD works in my desktop which has 2 GB of RAM.
Another solution would be to put your ghost32.exe on a BartPE CD or a VistaPE CD and run the backup from that environment.
Yea, I was on nu.nu and they were talking about Bart’s modular boot disk and it seemed like that is what Ghost had plus the archiving software.
Please let us know the outcome.