Re: ? Your How To Restore tutorial

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ekÆsine

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Re: ? Your How To Restore tutorial

techsupport wrote on 01-03-2005 08:49 AM:
Hello,

I am a newbie here and found your great tutorial and decided to give it a try and it worked great, thanks for adding the info about the hidden partition that is a big help, I would just like to know what to do to add an option on boot to restore the image from the hidden partition on the hard drive or from the cdrw/dvdr drive, (what I want to do is have the recovery partition on the hard drive and I also want to be able to restore it from the same boot dvd that I'm using to restore from the hard drive). Any help would be appreciated.

also I was wondering how do hp/compaq, etc.. initiate the system restores upon boot by pressing f10 or whatever... is this easy to do?

To be able to restore it from both a hidden partition on your hard disk and also from a restore CD or DVD requires making 2 restore discs. you will make a CD with the autoexec file telling ghost where your image is on your hidden partition. You would also make another DVD that has the image on it and also a different autoexec file telling ghost that your image is on your DVD

Symantec made GDISK that allows you to hide logical drives inside an extended partition or primary partition on a basic MBR disks. Symantec Ghost was designed to be able to read and write to these hidden partitions. You will see them visible in Ghost when you choose which filename to create or restore images to.

If you already created an image on the same partition or drive that you just hid with GDISK than you can skip these following steps: Hide whichever partition or drive you want with GDISK first than go into Ghost and create a Ghost image. Look at the very end of the screen when it asks you "compress image file? no, fast, high" or the screen that says "proceed with partition image creation?". Make note the part that shows you the destination file, for example:"destination: 1:2\ghost\winxphide.GHO". This is the same thing you do with CD or DVD images. You need to know where the image is saved to and you will need to replace that location in the autoexec.bat right after SCR=:

ghost.exe -clone,mode=pload,src=1:2\ghost\winxp.gho:1,dst=1:1

the part right after the filename ":1,dst=1:1" will be needed to tell ghost where to restore the image to. this is explained in the tutorial http://www.techist.com/computer_articles/restore/restore-disk.php:


In this example src=1:2\ghost\winxp.gho:1 is the location of the image file (source) with :1 designating the partition number within the image. If your image contains multiple partitions you can restore a specific partition by specifying the partition number inside the image. The comma is a separator so ,dst=1:1 (destination) means we are restoring this image to partition one on physical hard disk one (this is usually drive C:). You cannot restore an image to the same partition it is saved to. If it's a spanned image all files have to be located in the same folder. This example is for an image saved to hard disk. Using a CD or DVD burner is still very similar. You would replace the source with something like src=CDR0001\ghost\winxp.gho:1 or whichever your burner is assigned as in Ghost.


I think how compaq/HP are able to have an option at boot up using a function key (F1-F12) to restore an image is that they have a customized BIOS. I think the only way to do it is use their motherboards and try to modify their configuration files and images OR have the BIOS manufacturer make you a customized one. Either way would be difficult I think. These are just my guesses.
 
ok that is what I thought, I was just hoping that I could do it all with 1 disk.

I was thinking that maybe a script would take care of the boot by pressing f10, but I figured that it was probably motherboard specific.. thanks for the reply!
 
techsupport I see what you meant, I think maybe it IS POSSIBLE to do it with 1 DVD. You edit the DOS menu to allow 2 choices and the user can pick one, if not it will automatically run a default choice. edit config.sys for both choices. I don't have time to show you an example but this is what config.sys looks like. you would add your 2 custom menu choices here:


[menu]
menuitem=CD, Restore partition image.
menudefault=CD,1
menucolor=7,0

[HELP]
device=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=btdosm.sys
device=flashpt.sys
device=btcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=aspi2dos.sys
device=aspi8dos.sys
device=aspi4dos.sys
device=aspi8u2.sys
device=aspicd.sys /D:mscd001
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 2048

[CD]
device=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=btdosm.sys
device=flashpt.sys
device=btcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=aspi2dos.sys
device=aspi8dos.sys
device=aspi4dos.sys
device=aspi8u2.sys
device=aspicd.sys /D:mscd001
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 2048

[NOCD]
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 2048

[QUICK]

[COMMON]
files=10
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
lastdrive=z
 
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