Booting from a USB floppy

BouncingSoul

Stranger Than Fiction
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See title ... is this even possible?

I've got a set of Ghost book disks, made from the Ghost console, and working if you boot from an internal floppy. If I put them in my USB floppy drive and attempt to boot to it tells me to remove disks and try again. I've got 10 identical systems that I want to put a master image on and I just can't do it! What would be even easier would be to have a boot cd/dvd with all the NIC drivers and ghost software all in one but apparently this is impossible. Cause if I select the boot cd/dvd option in Ghost it only makes floppies. I hate Ghost!
 
it is possible, we do it all the time here at work. Depends on the make/model of the computer and if the computer/BIOS supports booting off the USB floppy. What kind of machines are these?
 
It's an HP dc5750. The USB floppy is detected in the BIOS and you can select it as the boot device, it just won't actually boot. I would LOVE to be able to restore my working image so I don't have to spend 3 hours removing all the crap HP puts on their new systems.
 
what version of ghost?

the dc57xx that we've had have always booted fine from our USB floppies.
 
I boot from a USB dvd drive even , USB floppies all the time at work , I have a small toshiba usb drive that works well, and so do the little usb drives that dell has with some model laptops, all on XP

But thinking about it , I have had some troubles with HP and getting a ghost image made , they are a little hard to get booted, with a ghost boot floppy, I had to fiddle around with them.
 
It's Ghost 8.0, HP's are the only system that I've had issues with. I used to struggle just to get them imaged. Now I can image with ease but I just can't restore. Making the image completely useless.
 
Why not make a bootable cd rom with your ghost.exe on there? You can use the files from the floppy and make it bootable with magic.iso or something you prefere, I do this all the time at work, I have bootable network enabled cd's for every computer model we have at the plant.
 
How do you go about doing that? If I select the boot cd option in ghost it still makes me supply floppies (I have no idea why). I'm guessing I'll need a certain file structure to pull this off, I just don't know what it is.
 
I've seen this guide before, never really looked through it cause I didn't know what "project" I needed. All of our images are on the ghost server, so I need to be able to boot into the ghost program and receive the image over the network. Any idea which project guide I'll need? Or will any of them work?
 
What you can do is this , within ghost there is an option to make a bootable network peer to peer floppy, you need to go to the HP website and locate the ndis drivers for your network card these tend to change from model to model, you download the ndis drivers and make the floppy this is the first step, you need to test that the new floppy can netbind, when you boot from it you will see the netbind has either succeded or failed, if it worked then you proceed to make a bootable cd and place all the ghost files from your floppy on your cd. I use magic iso to make the bootable images then burn them to a cd. I know this sounds hard but it realy is not all that hard, its getting the proper ndis drivers that counts.
 
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Have a look at this guide for making a bootable CD/DVD for Ghost.

Best I can figure is this guide doesn't work. I extracted the files, I mimicked his (bizarre) file structure. But Nero simply won't burn the file as its supposed to. If you use the tip of replacing the DosBootimage.IMA file with the custom one created in the guide, nero only allows you to read a floppy already in the drive, not to browse for the correct image. If you don't replace that file and just try to add the files manually you're left with an unbootable cd.

What you can do is this , within ghost there is an option to make a bootable network peer to peer floppy

I can't find an option to do that. I already have all the ndis drivers downloaded. I really have no idea, I'm simply stunned that Symantec hasn't dreamed up a way of doing this for those of us in the 21st century ... who don't use floppy drives.
 
I use ghost 2003 ! I know old eh ... but it works when you make a ghost floppy there is no options for network floppy? Without a peer to peer floppy there is no way to netbind.. as I said magic iso can take your network floppy and make an image that can be burned to a cd , you can use this guide to set the boot sector for the floppy emulation http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=311 and these are the boot files

Magic ISO is free for 30 days .. as for the ghost bootable floppy I dont use ghost 8 I cant understand why there is no network ghost option ...
 

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Here is some fun stuff...

Buried deep within the drivers I found a file called makedisk. It made 2 ghost boot floppies. So I ran it, attempted to boot the system from the usb floppy again... it worked. I have no idea why.

So I start the image restore session and it COMPLETELY kills the network. Our tills stop working, the time clocks stop storing swipes and most importantly ... I cant surf! As soon as the restore job gets done, everything goes back to normal. Weird eh?
 
and no one was tempted to put their hands in the tills ?

(emergency post :p)
 
and no one was tempted to put their hands in the tills ?

(emergency post :p)

Good idea, except I'm at a casino where camera's outnumber employees.

I've got a whole new issue now. I restored the image from the other pc and decided I should put the correct cdkey in (the one on the case). So I run my key change application and reapply the key. Reboot and now activation either a) fails or b) stays on the "checking for connectivity" screen. There is a thread on the hp forums about ghost + hp = bad news. I have a feeling I'll need to activate by calling MS. Which means the time I've saved by applying an image is negated. I think HP just hates their customers.
 
BartPE would be a great fit. they have a ghost plugin works well too.
 

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