Ever since I managed to create a bootable flash drive with the help of DaveH and BrianK, and, I might add, the flash drive experience gets better, I have focused my interest in using Ghost.exe more, but, as in the past this version of Ghost cannot "see" my external USB and Firewire powered destination drives.
Are there any drivers that can be added to Ghost.exe to enable it to "see" my external USB-Firewire drives or have I got to work around it and forget them and concentrate on eSata?
Deric
Not to worry Dave,
I have had a few days down on the south coast so I thought I would jog your memory with that subtle request 
Do you mean Ghost 2003 (PC-DOS) or Ghost.exe (MS-DOS) either way I can use any just fire away with the instructions and I will see if it works?
To get the best out of me it will have to wait till tomorrow, it's late and it's Sunday night and I ain't at my best.
Deric
It won't matter what kind of DOS you use, it's just a test.
If the floppy disks works we may change it, we need to make some changes anyway to put it on your flash drive.
I don't have Ghost 2003 installed at the moment but I have a system with an older version of system works.
It has a ghost program called "Ghost Boot Wizzard" that is used to make floppy disks.
I'm sure Ghost 2003 has the same thing.
When I start the wizzard it looks like this:
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/7391/diskwizzard.jpg
Use that top option like I have selected.
The next screen looks like this:
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2811/usb2.jpg
Select those 2 options.
Here is where your asking about PC DOS or MS DOS
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/6812/dosgy.jpg
I don't think that matters, but if you have a MSDOS floppy like a windows 98 boot disk, go ahead and use the button "Get MSDOS" I much prefer it anyway.
Dave
Ever since I managed to create a bootable flash drive with the help of DaveH and BrianK, and, I might add, the flash drive experience gets better, I have focused my interest in using Ghost.exe more, but, as in the past this version of Ghost cannot "see" my external USB and Firewire powered destination drives.
Are there any drivers that can be added to Ghost.exe to enable it to "see" my external USB-Firewire drives or have I got to work around it and forget them and concentrate on eSata?
Deric
Brian
I just realized why Deric may have been having so much trouble with a mouse.
You can't run mouse.com from a read-only media unless you already have a mouse.ini file written.
The first time it's ran, it creates the ini file. I must have been using a floppy image as my source that already had one written.
If it's not present, it gives an error about failure to write to the A drive.
I also can't get ctmouse beta 4 to work off read-only media either. In virtual PC it works fine from a floppy image but it hangs and won't run when I'm trying to run it from an ISO.
I think that may be one of the reasons I used to load all the files into a RAM drive and run them from there. I also remember either ghost or drive image would also not be able to write an error file if there was a problem and the only way to get around that was if it was all in a RAM drive.
Dave
Dave,
I had created a "Norton Ghost Boot Disk" in 2005 (26/02/05) UK date format, and I used the mouse.com file off that floppy when we were creating the bootable flash drive.
I will set to this afternoon and create another floppy as per your instructions and let you know when I am ready for the next stage.
Deric
Dave,
I have created a 2 floppy disk set using MS-DOS see pics, and I am ready for the next stage.
Deric
Dave,
I have booted up with the floppy disks and I can boot into Ghost.exe, also Ghost can "see" my Max 1 USB drive but can't "see" my Max 3 Firewire drive.
I did create another set of floppys to include the firewire driver but Ghost still can't "see" it, when loading in DOS I can see that both drivers are installed but the Firewire driver mentions the Iomega drive and Not the Maxtor.
I don't suppose it is a simple transfer of drivers onto the flash drive is it?, so I am ready when you are.
Deric
Good news, that driver aspiehci.sys will work for your USB.
When you made the disk with the firewire driver, can you tell me the name of that driver?
It should be on the first floppy in the "firewire" folder.
We might be able to simply find another driver.
Once we find all the right drivers, then yes we can add them to your USB stick.
I made a menu in my config.sys file that gives me a couple options:
Boot DOS
Boot DOS with CD-Rom Support
Boot DOS with USB2 Support
etc
Dave
DaveH wrote:
I also can't get ctmouse beta 4 to work off read-only media either.
Dave,
I've found ctmouse 191 alpha 1 to be the most reliable.
When you have time I'd appreciate a tutorial on creating and running a RAM drive. I have an app that needs more.com. It doesn't work from read-only media as it needs to write to a temp file. Do you think a RAM drive would work?
It should work fine, the RAM drive is read and write just like a hard drive although of course anything written to it is temporary and lost after a reboot.
The ram drive driver used in a windows 98 boot disk can be made as big as 32MB and thats usually plenty.
Somewhere around here I have some of my old floppy images I did this with, I'll look around later and figure out what exactly I did. It must have been more than 10 years ago and I can't even remember what I had for dinner 2 nights ago.
Dave
DaveH wrote: I can't even remember what I had for dinner 2 nights ago.
One night for me.
Dave,
When you made the disk with the firewire driver, can you tell me the name of that driver?
It should be on the first floppy in the "firewire" folder.
We might be able to simply find another driver.
The driver is :- aspi1394.sys
Deric
DStain wrote:The driver is :- aspi1394.sys
I think thats the one I had the most luck with.
Let me look and see if I have any others, I don't have any firewire devices but I think I made some boot disk before for firewire.
Brian, I made a real simple boot disk with a RAM drive. I been testing it as a floppy image in virtualPC and it works fine.
Haven't got aroung to trying it in grub or from an ISO yet.
I made a bootable floppy image with these files on it:
Io.sys
Msdos.sys
Himem.sys
Findramd.exe
Ramdrive.sys
Setramd.bat
Or you can take a windows98 SE floppy image and remove everything else.
My config.sys is:
--------------------------------------------------------
device=himem.sys
files=10
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 10240
lastdrive=z
-------------------------------------------------------------
You can see I set the RAM drive for 10MB, you can change that value up to a max of 32MB. Its set in KB's with 1024=1MB
My Autoexec.bat is:
-----------------------------------------------------
@ECHO OFF
set EXPAND=YES
SET DIRCMD=/O:N
set LglDrv=27 * 26 Z 25 Y 24 X 23 W 22 V 21 U 20 T 19 S 18 R 17 Q 16 P 15
set LglDrv=%LglDrv% O 14 N 13 M 12 L 11 K 10 J 9 I 8 H 7 G 6 F 5 E 4 D 3 C
cls
call setramd.bat %LglDrv%
set temp=%RAMD%:\
set tmp=%RAMD%:\
path=%RAMD%:\;a:
echo Your RAM Drive is Letter %RAMD%
------------------------------------------------------------
I made it display the drive letter of the RAM drive but I don't know if it can be set as a letter that will work on every system like you did with the CD-ROm drive letter.
It always takes the first availible drive letter and it's going to be different on every system depending on how many "DOS Visible" partitions are present.
However, like I said before, the variable %RAMD% can be used for any commands. Just remember to add a colon to the end if your changing drives:
%RAMD%:
A couple suggestions,
You don't want "more.com" to be simply copied from the A drive to the RAM drive because since the path is set for both drives if you run the command it may run more.com from the A drive instead of the RAM drive.
You might want to make a subfolder to hold it and any other files and then copy those to the RAM drive:
copy A:\MyFiles\*.* %RAMD%:\
If you have a lot of files, it sometimes is a little annoying to see all those files being copied.
Another option is to make all the files into a .cab file and extract them into the RAM drive just like the windows 98 boot disk does with the "ebd.cab"
extract.exe /y /e /l %RAMD%: MyFiles.cab > NUL
(needs extract.exe for that)
I don't think it applies, but if you need to use more than one floppy to load everything you can also copy io.sys to the ram drive and then in the autoexec.bat make a line:
set comspec=%RAMD%:\command.com
Then you can be switching floppies or CD's and still be able to run DOS out of the RAM drive.
Dave
Edit- You really don't need these lines:
set EXPAND=YES
SET DIRCMD=/O:N
I just noticed I left them on from the standard boot disk. You don't need the expand command, even if your using extract.exe and they way the directories are listed may not matter.
Thanks Dave,
I'll let you know what happens.
When we were doing the tests with "eltorito.sys" I was using a standard windows 98 boot disk.
I had increased the size of the RAM drive in config.sys and had no trouble with it using grub or from an ISO.
However you want to remove the last 3 lines in the autoexec:
rem clean up environment variables
set CDROM=
set LglDrv=
You could open up ebd.cab and add more.com, or you could make your own cab file with any and all the tools you want in the RAM drive.
Using either a CD-Rom driver (if it's an CD) or eltorio.sys if using grub, you could have a larger cab file on the root of the disk and extract it from there into the RAM drive. Or be able to copy the contents of a larger folder into the RAM drive.
For file copies from the root of a CD, I'm not sure if the "read only" attributes would cause a problem. Some files may need that attribute cleared once they are in the RAM drive.
I think that may have been another reason I prefered to extract them all from a cab or zip file.
Dave
Dave, superb instructions. I now have the more.com app running off a CD and a grub4DOS USBFD.
There were no complications. I put more.com in a folder along with a couple of other files and finished my autoexec.bat with..
copy A:\bjk\*.* %RAMD%:\
::echo Your RAM Drive is Letter %RAMD%
%RAMD%:
hd0.bat
Edit... I have 26 partitions on my HD0. 25 are Primary. I use tbosdt.exe to list the Partition IDs and because I have so many partitions they scroll off the screen without more.com.
tbosdt allows me to copy data to partitions that aren't in the MBR partition table.
excellent!
you can also use batch file to automate it and only extract the files when needed.
for example instead of running a "program.exe" you can put that program and all the necessary files into a subfolder and then make a batch file with the same name: program.bat
Then your typing the same program name and everything else happens in the background.
program.bat would copy all the files into the RAM drive, change directories into the RAM drive and then start the program and exit.
Wow, thats a lot of partitions.
Is it 26 because there are only 26 letters in the alphabet?
