In Fire We Trust

Today we are going to discuss some ways for starting Norton Ghost over network.
The idea came thanks to jorgy and more speciffically due to his comment http://www.getoto.net/2007/03/netinstall-with-pxe-tftp-dhcp/#comment-110.
Today’s article will build up on the already laid base.

The idea
We have to construct proper media, able to boot over network and put ghost in it. The original request was to describe a way of starting an iso image over network, but it was rejected due to the fact that the image could be a bit large. All in all there is no need to hurl 80 М over the net and after that put it in a ram disk (although it is possible). Anyway this will be mentioned later for the interested parties.

Plan of action
We have to complete the following steps:

• Creation of a boot media
• Adding Norton Ghost inside it
• Augmenting our network boot system

Creation of a boot media
As Norton Ghost is basically a win32/DOS application we will need a boot media which supports DOS environment. At least for me the most confortable starting point is the boot disk for Windows 98 SE. As this boot floppy is quite full we will have to slim it down (think getting rid of most of the stufff).
For starter we won’t be using any CD/DVD so we will dump all the drivers on this topic, next are the recovvery tools (ebd.cab, expand.exe) and few other small bits. At the end we should have a prety basic boot system with only the bare minimum like command.com, autoexec, and couple of sys files leaving us with enough space to put ghost.exe. At the end f the article there is link to a complete and ready for usage media.
A boot disk can be found in various places, but i personally recommend http://www.bootdisk.com/.

Друг вариант за подготвяне на медията е да намерим bootsector от подобна дискета и да го запишем в началото на празен файл. Това може да се постигне със dd, cat и други различни приятели :).

Adding Norton Ghost in the media
This is quite a simple operation. We just have to mount the previously prepared media and copy in it ghost.exe.

Augmenting the network boot system
Here is the serious part.
As we are going to start dos it becomes a little awkward. It should be lied slightly. This is achieved thanks to PXE linux and the kernel provided by the project, which is called memdisk.
We start with the following assumption:

• We are going to use the currently available configuration which we build in the article Network install with DHCP & TFTP

We have to copy memdisk from pxelinux in our kernels dir and the already prepared media in initrd.

After they are added we should add the following section to the file /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

label Ghost
    kernel kernels/memdisk
    append initrd=initrd/ghost.img

With this we are finished.

Booting an iso image
As the iso images have their own boot sector they can too be booted thanks to memdisk. Which means that for initrd we should use the iso image.
On this topic you should be careful with the size of the iso file and the available ram memory.

Conclusion
With the help of this you can start ghost for a recovery from a local disk. With this writing and the available media you cannot restore from network shares/ghostcast (there is no network support included). Also you can’t count on high memmory and few small details usually taken for granted. All in all the image is usefull within this limits.

Links/stuff

• http://syslinux.zytor.com/ - information about syslinux tools
• PXE
• DHCP in wikipedia
• http://www.dhcp.org/
• Ready boot media with Ghost