asked on

Mulitcard Ghost Boot CD with Ramdrive

I am been struggling with this one for quiet a while, so I don't know if it can be done the way I want it to. I am trying the make a ghost boot cd that automatically finds the driver and loads them and loads up ghost program. I dont want to have to select a certain driver for a partiular nic. I want it to work just like the two set floppy boot disks except on a cd with a ram drive. My problem comes when I try to run the pcidet.dos, protman.dos, and dsk_pkt.dos files off of the ram drive. I am not sure if they can be ran anywhere but the config.sys file, if so how? Thank for the help in advance.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

GuruGary

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

BCUST

ASKER

I think that bootdisk would work, but it is far to complicated. I do already have the NDIS drivers. I am using the pcidet.dos to detect the nic card from the ramdrive, but when it run it said:
Detection PCI Network Card
Locating PCI BIOS .... Found
Error opening file

I am not sure if this program (pcidet.dos) will work. I have seen the other program pciscan.exe but I dont know how the use it.

BCUST

ASKER

oh yeah, i forgot to include my boot files

config.sys
[Common]
files=40
break=off
buffers=30
lastdrive=z
stacks=0,0
dos=high,umb
install=XMSDSK.EXE 8192 g: /Y
install=a:\lha.exe e /n2 a:\command.lzh g:\
SHELL=g:\COMMAND.COM /E:4096 /P
install=a:\extract.exe /e /y /l g: ramfiles.cab

autoexec.bat
g:
device \net\pcidet.dos

the files in ramfiles consist of
device.com
himem.sys
\net\dis_pkt.dos
\net\doit.bat
\net\netbind.com
\net\pcidet.dos
\net\protman.dos
\net\protman.exe
\net\protocol.ini
\net\card0\doit.bat
\net\card0\el90x.dos
\net\card0\protocol.ini
\net\card1\b57.dos
\net\card1\doit.bat
\net\card1\protocol.ini
\net\card2\b57.dos
\net\card2\doit.bat
\net\card2\protocol.ini
\net\card3\e1000.dos
\net\card3\doit.bat
\net\card3\protocol.ini

all the files come from Ghost Boot Disk Wizard 8.0

if you need to know anything else let me know

GuruGary

Okay, how about this:
http://help.ischool.washington.edu/faqs/12_29_en.html

If that still isn't what you are looking for, then let me know what version of Ghost you are using, and what you want to accomplish (like "boot to CD, with driver support of el90.dos, b57.dos and e100.dos; map network drive of \\server\share and be able to save Ghost drive images to share")

BCUST

ASKER

yeah that is a good article, I have been there and the author was going to do what i wanted but then scraped the idea. I want to use the RamDrive idea, I don't want to have to select which driver I want to use for each different computer I ghost. What I want is to be able to run the two set multicard template floppy ghost boot disks from a cd. The disks are created with Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard > then select Network Boot Disk > then select Mulitcard Template > select drivers need which are in my case el90x.dos, b57.dos and e1000.dos > Use PC DOS is my only choice so, Next > use all the defaults here, Next > i don't select nothing here, Next > i use DHCP, Next > Drive a:, Format Yes, Next > Next > Then disk makes. I don't need to map any network drives. I just want to get disk one you just created to work without writing to the disk and the once that works i will just have to put disk two, which is only ghost.exe, on the cd also.

ZaSSeR

So basically you just want to move the bootable floppy onto a bootable CD?

First write the floppy and then use a CD burning program such as Nero (no, the bad ones can't do this trick)
to make a bootable CD and read the bootable stuff off your shiny new Ghost boot floppy. Works for us.

In case your problem is not having a floppy drive, buy or borrow and USB floppy drive.
I don't think Ghost has an option to write the floppy image to the hard drive, and even so, it would
be more difficult (don't know any) to find a program that would write a floppy image directly to a bootable CD.
So assuming you can come up with a floppy drive, the above chapter is your easiest solution.
Don't bother with other CD burning programs, get Nero and be done with it. www.nero.com

BCUST

ASKER

I have a floppy drive and I can make a bootable cd with nero or any other cd burning program with the floppy that i want. The problem lies in the file now on the bootable cd. They require to write to the disk to perform the necessary tasks that they need to do. So when the cd run they cant write to the cd, and therefore errors out.

ZaSSeR

Oh.. all right. We didn't get no error when we used this.

Anyway, for RAM drive creation see for example XMSDSK v1.9i
(described for example in context of boot disks at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/bootdisk/readme.htm)

BCUST

ASKER

I have the ram drive created. The files above are the one I have put together. And my error come when the pcidet.dos file attemps to run. Also when I create the two disk boot set from the Ghost Boot Wizard, then put that on a bootable cd there is the errors when the boot sequence trys to write to the disk.

BCUST

ASKER

I finally found a way using a boot disk from http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/. I still don't know exactly how this all works, but I tweaked to boot disk that I got from here enough to do what I want it to do.

GuruGary

Glad you got it to work. Just today I broke out my Ghost Solutions Suite CD to start looking at how Ghost does it. Thanks for the update!