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I have a Boot CD with a DOS version of Ghost in it (Ghost 11). I used to use it for booting a PC, running Ghost from there, and creating an image of a hard drive partition. I did that under Win Vista, Win 7, Win 8.

Now I have a PC with Windows 10 and no CD reader. My intention is to be able to backup and restore images, without having Ghost installed in my system. So I would need to boot from a pendrive, and run Ghost from the command prompt (as I did before with no problem).

What I got so far: I booted from a pendrive formatted with Rufus and FreeDOS. I copied the exes there. But:

  1. When I execute ghost32.exe or ghost64.exe I get "This command cannot run in DOS mode".

  2. Using dir a:, etc. I do not find my hard drive.

So, my questions are:

  1. I wonder if there is any other thing that I can do to be able to boot from USB and run my exes.
    I think I do not have installation disks for a Windows version, since my Win 10 came preinstalled. I have another Win 8 PC, which also came preinstalled.* And I have another Win Vista PC (I may not have the installation CDs).

  2. Even in this case, I wonder if ghost will find my hard disk partitions. Perhaps if I manage to make a bootable USB with some Win installation, that automatically allows the OS to recognize the HD partitions.

EDIT - PS: I found How can I run Ghost from a bootable USB key drive? . I tried the Hiren's way (as pointed out by ubiquibacon). It successfully booted and opened Ghost in the Win 8 PC. But in the Win 10 PC it started booting and expanding programs to the ramdrive R:, where it hangs.

* All sources that I found pointed to methods requiring the installation CDs (e.g., this). It is worth noting that I only need to be able to boot. Many pages warn that I would not be able to make a bootable USB out of a preinstalled Win PC, since the preinstalled Win is intended only for one PC. The argument would not apply, since I only want a bootable USB, not a boot+WinInstall USB.

Community
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sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
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3 Answers3

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This video provided a partial answer: The issue involves the high memory (perhaps due to having a solid state hard drive?). I could open Ghost, but it does not recognize my hard drive.

But this probably belongs to a separate question.

sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
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I still use ghost myself, and have been in this same situation. I suggest using YUMI to create bootable Flashdrive, and download Hirens BCD or FalconFour BCD. From there boot into either. Doing this will allow you to boot into a limited version of Windows XP from there browse to the flash drive you have Ghost installed on and Run the .exe.

b14smith
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Regards, I have Ghost v12.xx and with Windows 7 if you run Windows Shadow copy service, you can "hot image" running systems. I use it on Windows 10 and 7. Tried hiren which works too, tried USB dos boot with modern drivers and got snow crash (kernel panicked). Using hot image technique is painless. I use grub4usb to make USB bootable.

user1284084
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