I wasn't sure where to stick this article.

I wanted to automate a back and restore feature. I liked the idea of the dell secret partition so i did something similar also its easy to complicate things more than necessary when it comes to boot management. I seen people struggling getting there head around booting so i hope this helps.

This is what i have done. Your drive boots up and you have 2 menu options from boot.ini one loads your o/s the other option loads up a ghost menu enabling you to backup(including check image integrity) and restore images of your o/s usually xp from a logical 3rd partition which can be hidden(or not hidden if you want to store extra stuff) and so in effect you loading dos from boot.ini all from the hard drive. To do this I created a small fat 16 partiton before C: So whether its ghost booting up or your XP it still be C: It even takes the hassle out of looking for any bootcd as it runs entirely from hard drive running from boot.ini. You might think this is nothing new, Correct. Its some ideas brought all together and automated, say you at someones house and you want to put a quick backup and restore in place. when they want to restore there partition theres no need for searching for a boot cd to restore. so it less of a hassle to backup and so faster. so its good customers, family and for lazy people.

The good thing it dont need no 3rd party boot manager which others said you need. No, it wont touch the mbr which can be a good thing if you doing it on others pcs. I tried trueimage 10 and it doesnt work still i believe with the 965 chipset so this is how this all came about and got me thinking. I also managed to find a dos cd-rom driver to work with the 965 chipset which is included in the bootdisk. I made a bootdisk with all the necessary files to automate it. The only part i havent managed to do yet is automate creating the 50mb partition because to do that your C: ntfs drive has to be resized. I know some use partition software can use a script but everybody hard drive is different size so dont think it would work. I am interested in a freeware solution. so if you can help me out that be great.I know of partition resizer thats free but dosen't resize ntfs only moves. Basically i done the ground work for this to be improved.

Once in place it can be customized and extra utils like partition magic can be run from the menu or whatever you want on the dos partition. Another benefit is its easier to fix your partitions having FAT as the first partition. Basically i done the ground work.

Info about the bootdisk
It all fits on a floppy boot disk due to using mbrwizd instead of gdisk(1.12mb).


Okay lets start.

You need to make another 2 partitions from your existing C: partition so you have 3 partitions in all. First make a 50mb Primary FAT partition (this is where ghost is kept) have it before the first partition on the drive that holds your current C: partition. name it FAT if you like. then create a logical partition(this is where the ghost images are kept) from your existing C: drive, so you can call it BACKUP or IMAGES. Decide on the size from your requirements. The ghost is auto set to high compression so that be half of the data approx. eg. 10gb data will take up 5gb approx. I used partition magic. You then make a logical drive You might have to do this from a boot cd as it probably say its in use.




The fact remains that you wont see them as continous driver letters C: D: E: but as in this case E: C: I: especially if you have multiple drives. It doesnt matter the drives are still partition 1 2 and 3 in that order and ghost treats them like that and not as drive letters. The I: drive will become hidden after the installation. Whatever is the 3rd partition is hidden.

Don't make it active yet. The bootdisk will do that in dos. You can restore your original C: drive back to the boot drive at any time by running mbrwizd and making your original C: drive active again.

Now im assuming your original boot.ini file is like below, if not then update the boot.ini in the dos folder with yours. also im assuming your NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM are the same which they may not or might even get updated in the future so it best you compare the versions and turn off the attrib -s -h -r and update the ones in the dos folder. The attrib +s +h +r will be turned on again when they get copied to the FAT partition. The versions are the latest after all sp2 updates at this time of post. NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM are seperate copies on the FAT drive. You still have your original files untouched. If you run a upto date xp as of now then you don't need to do nothing.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Now ghost wont fit on the bootdisk so it good you make a bootable usb or cd using this floppy bootdisk image as the boot part and fill up with the cd with lots of utilites that you can set the boot batch file to copy over to the FAT partition. I set it to copy ghost if it there. so copy at least ghost to it. You wont need this cd again as all ghost and utilites are now on the FAT partition. You just use it to setup first time.

So once the bootdisk finished you end up with the following files on the FAT partition which is now C: (Your original XP is still C: also, the drive letters are just swapped around whichever one you use) which boots up and loads another boot.ini with 2 choices 1 for your o/s that your other drive or dos which takes you to the Ghost menu.

IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
COMMAND.COM
BOOTSECT.622
BOOT.INI
CONFIG.SYS
AUTOEXEC.BAT
NTDETECT.COM
NTLDR
GHOST.EXE
GDISK.EXE

In the ghost menu we have these options

Restore Windows 1st Install
Backup Windows 1st Install
Check intergrity of 1st Install
Restore Windows 1st Install + Software + Drivers
Backup Windows 1st Install + Software + Drivers
Check intergrity of 1st Install + Software + Drivers
Restore Windows Later Stable
Backup Windows Later Stable
Check intergrity of Later Stable

The ghost backup,check image and restore commands are already setup and when a backup is created its then checked for errors.

You don't hide the FAT drive(which isnt a bad thing because you can alter the bootup easily in windows) The backup image drive gets hidden automatically which is the whole point so they don't get deleted and not seen in windows.

To make your iso which includes sata support. It has to be on cd if you going to put ghost and gdisk on the cd to fit. It could run from floppy if you are willing to copy gdisk and ghost manually to the new c: drive after the install of the boot disk.

Download the floppy image Here to make the bootable iso

To use in ultraiso select Bootable and select Load Boot File and select the boot.ima
It should change to Bootable on yellow box if done right. the main browsers should be empty. Drag your copy gdisk.exe and ghost.exe into the main top right box. Now goto File and click save the iso. Now goto Tools and select Burn Image and Burn.

If you in the FAT partition then on a security point its still good because you still can't access the ntfs partition.

Hi there, I know this a bit of a bump I'm very interested in creating a system restore much like this one. However the link quoted for the floppy does not work. If anyone has the file or another link would be greatly appreciated since I would love to try this restore out

Thank you in advance

Mark

Hello Mark, I am back, been off the scene awhile. The domain subscription had ended so the link went down. I post an iso and possibly better way soon.

Regards

Hi guys,

I'm so interested to get more information about such How-to, boot.imi link is not working. Would you please let me know if you have step-by-step for such how-to from A-Z.

I have some questions:

Can I copy the Ghost files and the batches to a FAT partition without making this partition a bootable partition by installing system files Like MS-DOS or PC DOS, and how I shall Make it work with or install PCDOS for e.g. Do I need to install it before I install WINXP?

Is there any step-by-step in how edit the boot.ini file in order to boot from FAT Partition, or from a batch file directory?

Can I find a copy of the Batch files that you provided, e.g the DOS or the Ghost Menu above?

I just want to thank you all for help, I'm so interested to implement such solution on my PC, but I'm lost little bit, I feel that the orginal POST for this how-to is missing a lot of information and I don;t know where. I believe if possible I would love to see step-by-step from A-Z from Creating FAT Partition, installing windows, prepare the GHOST and Batch files, etc and if you can insert some capture images will be great.

I believe and after a lot of search, is not easy to make such solution and I'm so possitive that it will help a lot of people out there.

Again thank you for your help.

All

Here's a new link to the image to do it all in the tutorial which is now up and running again.

http://artco.adsl24.co.uk/boot.ima

Hi to all,

I know this is probably a bump but maybe someone will want to help me.

I created the partitions as described. I created the floppy from the image file that has been posted.
When the floppy boots up it can't detect the C drive (or first partition). However if I keep a cd in the drive it thinks that the cd rom drive is C:.
So when the start.bat script is called it can't copy anything to C: because its a cd.

I even tried going back into windows and copying the files manually with no luck.

Dose anyone know what the problem is?

A SATA disk not set as "simulate IDE/ATAPI" or "disabled" or "PATA access" (or whatever the setting is) in BIOS?

jaclaz

If you didn't follow exactly to the letter something may of gone wrong. I not sure what may be wrong in your case. I had plans to improve it in the coming months. In the meantime why don't you check out my other recovery menu. recover.exe which loads a boot.ini menu using grub4dos (which is an improvement on the ghost menu) which is at my new forum here

I was messaged that the USB Fixed Disk Driver link was down so try this driver. http://www.eeepcapps.com/uploads/xpfildrvr1224_320.zip

I get 403 forbidden when i try to download this link, is there a user/pass for it?

You can always get the FREE edition of Acronis True Image.

Info here. http://help.lockergnome.com/general/Acroni...opict54543.html

is there a way to redirect the Documents and Settings folder in Windows XP that contains the user profile to the another partition not the hidden ghost partition this way way I ask the user to restore there laptop they won't loose their user profile.

Yes , when you perform an UA install it is an option in the answer file. Check out the options for the Winnt.sif file in the unattended guide.

is there a way I can edit the Winnt.sif file. I already built the laptop with using the ghost hidden partation.
Is there a way to edit the Winnt.sif file and how do I edit the file to point the Documents and Settings to a different partation.
I tried using using sysprep and include the line ProfilesDir=Y:\Documents and Settings in the [GuiUNattended] section but I get the error message setup.exe application error.
The instruction at 0x764436e74 referenced memory at 0x95ce28e8 the memory could not be read click ok to terminate the program and click cancel to debug the program.

For the ghost menu is there a way to change it to just use these features

Restore Windows 1st Install
Backup Windows 1st Install
Restore Windows 1st Install + Software + Drivers
Backup Windows 1st Install + Software + Drivers
As I understand it if use the Backup Windows 1st Install it creates one ghost image named FIRST_INSTALL.GHO
If I use the Backup Windows 1st Install+Software+Drivers it create another ghost image named SOFTWARE_DRIVERS.GHO
So I use the Restore Backup Windows 1st Install+Software+Drivers it should restore the 2nd ghost image
I tried this and it still keeps on trying to restore the image named FIRST_INSTALL.GHO instead of SOFTWARE DRIVERS.GHO
Can someone tell me what am I doing wrong?

Hi there need a little help from the author please or anyone else that knows what they are doing.

The instructions for this tutorial were a little confusing as it seem to jump about like in the first paragraph ( ok lets start) it says you need to create 2 more partitions, 1 fat 16 Primary before C drive then 1 logical partition called BACKUP after C which i have done no problems. but then at end of paragraph it says

"You then make a logical drive You might have to do this from a boot cd as it probably say its in use."
Can i just confirm this is refereing to that BACKUP partition?

Next It goes on to saying about making a boot disk using the link and adding ghost.exe and gdisk.exe to another disk is that righ?
What i done was use the image and the instructions at bottom using ultraiso so i ended up with the boot image files+ghost.exe, gdisk.exe on same cd.

Now my machine on reboot has a 50mb fat 16 primary partition, 25gig C partition primary and a logical BACKUP partition. After using the CD which booted on its own it asks do i wish to replace boot sector of the drive which i then say yes.
The menu works i have both restore and windows bit clicking windows works restore menu comes up but not tried the functions yet. But tut says my BACKUP partition should now be hidden? it is not and also my Fat 16 partition should be also C: it is not. i have my C drive Fat16 as D and BACKUP as G.
Is this how it supposed to be?

I may also add that bootpart says there are 0,1,2,3 partitions 1 having a * next to it?
Also Gdisk says there are 4 partitions on my disk.

And finnaly i think i understand the basic funtions of the restore menu but what is the backup windows later stable? is this how it sounds another backup simualr to the others just slightyl ahead of a basic install?