When booting Windows PE from bootdisk Ghost fails to load

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

Ghost fails to load after booting a client from a Ghost boot disk.  Windows PE appears to load fine, however, the Ghost executable does not present an error and Windows cannot find the ghost64.exe file.

Environment

GSS 3.x

Cause

The Ghost executables, ghost64.exe or ghost32.exe are not present on the boot media

Resolution

This will happen if the OEM Extensions field is not changed from the default of <none> when creating the bootdisk configuration.  To fix this, select GSS or <all> for this setting when creating your bootdisk configuration.  This tells the Boot Disk Creator(BDC) to include the ghost executables on the boot media.

NOTE:  This option is ONLY available in the Ghost Standard Tools version of the BDC and so doesn't apply to the BDC available from the GSS Console installation.

Considerations:

Boot Disk Creator from the GSS server installation can create a bootdisk but is meant more for leveraging the Ghost Client and Server communication to do jobs.  In this case, the Ghost files would be copied from the GSS server after the client has checked in with the server as opposed to being included on the boot media.

For more information, see Planning and Implementing Ghost Solution Suite 3, GSS "Getting Started" Documentation, and Getting Started With Ghost Standard Tools 3.x from download to implementation