Symantec Ghost Boot CD With Mouse and Network Support

Introduction
If you build a Symantec Ghost Boot CD from Ghost Boot Wizard there will be no mouse support. The CD will work in every other respect, booting DOS (PC-DOS is the default), connecting the network interface card (NIC), using the driver you selected, to the network and running the Ghost application. It is unfortunate that Symantec have not included mouse support in the CD target boot package as they have done in the Floppy Disk set. Although you can use the arrow keys to navigate the menus in Ghost, it is much more intuitive to select the required option by moving and clicking the mouse buttons. First I will run through how to make a Ghost Floppy Disk Set and Ghost Boot CD using Ghost Boot Wizard, then give step by step instructions on how to build a Ghost Boot CD with mouse and network support.

Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.0

The latest version of Symantec Ghost is Ghost 11 and is supplied as part of the Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 for which we have a support licence for twenty copies. For details of the licence see Sheila Gardner or Archie Howitt. This package contains: Symantec Ghost Console Symantec Ghost Console Client Symantec GhostCast Server Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard Symantec Ghost Symantec Ghost User Migration Wizard Other utility programs.. The latest version of Symantec Ghost Suite 2.0 has been downloaded and is available on a CD for installation.

Installing Symantec Ghost

Copy the install program from the Symantec Install CD to some temporary folder and in that folder run Symantec_Ghost_Solution_Suite _2.0_AllWin_EN.exe, which is a selfextracting program. If you get a Security Warning you can safely ignore it. An install dialogue box will appear automatically. Note the Destination folder should be the same as your temporary folder - Install.

Lots of folders and files will be extracted. Then the Symantec Ghost Suite install selection dialogue box will come up. Click on Install Symantec Ghost at the top of the list. A second list selection will appear. This time click on Install Ghost Standard Tools, which is the third option down from the top of the list. Accept all the defaults for the install procedure. This will take a few minutes to complete, at the end - Finish. You can now close the Symantec Ghost Solution Suite install selection dialogue - you can always get it back if you want to install other options by running CDStart.exe in your temporary folder.

Ghost Boot Wizard

For the next part you will have to find out what network card (NIC) is in the computer(s) you want to image. You can see this by opening the Device Manager and clicking on the Network adapters - note this down. You will have to get a DOS driver for this device if it is not included in this next step. First we will create a Bootable Ghost CD with network support for disk imaging or cloning note there will be no mouse support. From the Windows Start button menu select All Programs, you should see a new entry for Symantec Ghost - select Ghost Boot Wizard. In the Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard dialogue box select Network Boot Package - Next. You will see a couple of Universal Packet drivers - these may suffice, but I doubt it. You could try them first if you want, or tick the box Show All Drivers and see if your driver is there - if it is then select it. If it is not, you will have to add the driver you obtained earlier. - Next. Leave as PC-DOS - Next. Leave as Symantec Ghost and make sure the Program Location is: C:\Program Files\ Symantec\Ghost\ghost.exe Next Next Keep as DHCP - Next. In the Destination Drive dialogue box select Create ISO Image and browse to your temporary folder. In the File name box give your ISO a name e.g. Ghost_boot.iso Save, Next. Look at the Review window - if it looks right - Next. The ISO file will be generated and written to your temporary folder. When done - Finish. In your temporary folder you will have the ISO image - burn it to CD. Boot your PC with this CD and all should work - assuming you have the right NIC driver. A similar procedure can be carried out to produce a Floppy Disc Set, but this time at the Destination Drive dialogue window select Floppy Disk Set Next. Inspect the Review

window - Next. A warning message will inform you that two floppy disks are required OK, Start to format the first floppy disk. When this is done - close, the floppy disk will now be written. On completion a message will tell you to insert the second disk follow the same procedure as for the first disk. When finished, mark the floppy disks: disk1 & disk2. Booting your PC with this floppy disk set will give you both network and mouse support.

Ghost Boot CD with Mouse and Network Support

The following notes are based on an article Creating Bootable CD/DVDs Without A:\Floppy Drive: http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html It may be a good idea to gain some background information by reading this article before proceeding further. As mentioned above, using Ghost Wizard to produce a Boot CD will not give you mouse support, however, we have seen that the Floppy Disk Set does. You would think that you could use these floppy disks to supply the operating system files from which Ghost Wizard would produce the CD image, but you can not. The Floppy Disk Set is built using PC-DOS by default and MS-DOS is required. Admittedly you can build a Floppy Disk Set or a Boot ISO image, for burning on to CD, using MS-DOS supplied from an external source, such as a floppy disk. However, this version of MS-DOS must be produced from Windows 95 or 98 no other version is compatible! If you do this the Boot Ghost CD produced still does not have mouse support, even although you provide the mouse driver and edit the MS-DOS files, autoexec.bat and config.sys, with the required information since Ghost Wizard generates its own copy of these files. Here I will give the step-by-step procedure I used to produce a Ghost Boot CD based on the article mentioned above. My solution, however, will also include network support. First create the following directory tree in which to build the project files: C:\Bootable CD Project |_Boot Image |_Downloads | |_Mouse (Microsoft) | |_Win98se OEM Boot Disk | |_WinImage |_Extracted Files |_WinImage Then download the following files to their respective Downloads subdirectories:

Mouse (Microsoft) from http://www.bootdisk.com/readme.htm#mouse Win98se OEM Boot Disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm WinImage from http://www.winimage.com

From the Downloads\WinImage subdirectory install WinImage, by running the selfextracting program winima80.exe, into C:\Bootable CD Project\WinImage. Then change to this directory and start WinImage by clicking on winimag.exe. From the File|Open menu selection in WinImage, select Files of Type: All WinImage files (*.IM?,*WLZ,*.EXE) Then open C:\Bootable CD project\Downloads\Win98se OEM Boot Disk\boot98.exe The hidden image files within boot98.exe are revealed and listed in the main window of WinImage. Extract the following files by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on each file in turn:
autoexec.bat command.com config.sys himem.sys io.sys msdos.sys oakcdrom.sys ebd.cab

Then from the Image menu select Extract and in the dialogue box browse to the directory C:\Bootable CD Project\Extracted Files - OK to have the files extracted. These are the files that will be used to create the operating system image on the Boot CD. Now in the Extracted Files directory we have to edit two files, add the mouse driver, network driver and the file mscdex.exe. To add the mouse driver, just copy mouse.com from the Downloads\Mouse (Microsoft) directory that you downloaded earlier. The easiest way to get the network driver files is to make a Floppy Disk Set from Ghost Wizard as explained above. Open the first floppy disk in Windows Explorer and copy all the files from the Net directory. You can also do the same from a Boot Ghost CD by opening OSBOOT.IMG in WinImage and extracting the files from the Net directory. The C:\Bootable CD Project\Extracted Files should now look like:
autoexec.bat b57.dos command.com config.sys dis_pkt.dos

himem.sys io.sys mouse.com mscdex.exe msdos.sys netbind.com oakcdrom.sys protman.dos protman.exe prorocol.ini ebd.cab

Now we want to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Open autoexec.bat in Windows Notepad and delete all its contents. Then add the following: @echo off path=a:\;x:\ mouse.com mscdex.exe /d:ghost /l:x /m:16 /v netbind.com ghost.exe Open config.syst in Windows Notepad and delete all its contents. Then add the following: device=oakcdrom.sys /d:ghost device=himem.sys device=protman.dos /I:A: device=dis_pkt.dos device=B57.dos lastdrive=z

Now we are ready to make the image. In WinImage select File|New and in the Format Selection dialogue box select 1.44 MB - OK. From the Image menu select Inject and navigate to the C:\Bootable CD Project\Extracted Files. Hold down the Ctrl key and click on all files except ebd.cab to select them Open, Yes. Go to the Image menu and select Boot sector Properties and then click on the Windows 95/98 button - OK. Save the file as GhostBootCD in the C:\Bootable CD Project\Boot Image directory with the Save as Type: box selected as Image file (*.IMA). Open the C:\Bootable CD Project\Boot Image directory. There you will find the file GhostBootCD.ima, which can now be used for the Boot CD image. Close WinImage.

Burning the CD
I used Nero 7 Premium to burn the image to CD but other popular DVD/CD burning programs such as Roxio Easy CD Creator will do equally well. Open Nero 7 and select CD as the disk type from the dropdown menu. From the Applications menu select Nero Burn Rom and in the New Compilations window choose CD-ROM (Boot). Under the Boot tab select Image file as the source of the boot image data, browse to C:\Bootable CD Project\Boot Image and select GhostBootCD.ima - Open to select this as the boot image to burn - New. In the right hand File Browser pane navigate to C:\Program Files\Symantec\Ghost and drag a copy of ghost.exe to the centre pane. Pop a CD-ROM (I suggest a CD-RW at first until you are happy with the results) into the CD-Rewriter and click on the Burn icon in the Tool bar. When the Burn Compilation dialogue appears click Burn to commence burning the image to CD.

Booting with the Ghost CD

When you boot the computer with the Boot Ghost CD, information will be displayed on the monitor showing the operating system, network drivers and mouse driver being loaded. Then Ghost will be launched and you will have mouse and network support. When you have finished, and quit Ghost, notice the prompt will be A:\> and a dir command will read the CD in the CD-drive as if it was a floppy disk. You will see all the files listed that you used to make up the boot image. The Ghost application is on the mounted drive X. To change to this drive enter X: - <return>. A dir command will show the Ghost.exe program file. The path command will show: Path=A:\;X:\ indicating that Ghost can be rerun at any time from the A: or X: drives.

Archie Howitt 03 May 2007

Appendix:
Here are some notes to explain the editing in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files most of these have been lifted from: http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/started.html with some addition given for network support.

autoexe.bat
The path= instructs DOS to look in the root directory of the drives with these letters for the listed programs that are called for in the autoexec.bat file, or typed at the DOS prompt, so in this case, the root directory of A: and X:. You can also specify specific folders (directories), and subdirectories if you wish. The mouse.com will load that mouse program if found in the path= statement path. The mscdex.exe program assigns the drive letter to the optical drives. The command line switch /d:ghost is the link to the config.sys program oakcdrom.sys that mounted the optical drive. The command line switch /l:x tells mscdex.exe to use as the first possible drive letter, the letter X: so the first optical drive letter can be no less than X:. If you have a second optical drive, it will be assigned the drive letter Y:. If you wish the first letter to be assigned to the optical drive to be M:, then change the x to m so it looks like this /l:m. But, in DOS, that letter has to be after all the hard drive partitions have been assigned, or else it will default to the next available letter after the hard drive partitions. You would also have to change the path statement above so the x is m, like so: path=a:\;m:\. The command line switch /m:16 is telling DOS to set aside 16 memory sector buffers for better performance. The command line switch /v is for verbose, it tells mscdex.exe to display after loading the full text results of what it has done. The netbind.com is part of the network driver building process. Last thing to be done is to load and run Ghost.

config.sys
The oakcdrom.sys file is a universal driver that mounts a CD or DVD drive so you can read from it. The /d:ghost after oakcdrom.sys is a command line switch that tells oakcdrom.sys what name to give to the CD-ROM drive that mscdex.exe in the autoexec.bat file will look for, it is just a designated name so could be anything that is eight or less characters after the /d: . The himem.sys device loads DOS in high memory (not really required but I have put it in). Network files are protman.dos, dis_pkt.dos and B57.dos. Note the /I:A: telling protman to find the files on the A drive. The lastdrive=z tells DOS to reserve memory space so drive letters A: through Z: can be used.