Ghost and SATA/RAID on A8V?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wayne Fulton
  • Start date Start date
W

Wayne Fulton

I'm planning to use SATA/RAID disks for the first time, with either a
Asus A8V or MSI K8N Neo2 motherboard, and an AMD64 cpu. I use Ghost for
system backups, which boots to a Dos floppy, and so the SATA/RAID is a
big concern for it. Can it still work?

The concern is about this Dos floppy for Ghost 7, or the newest version
either, working with SATA/RAID? This definitely seems to rule out the
MSI K8N, because the MSI K8N manual says "No win98 on SATA" and says "No
Win98 on RAID". I think the Asus A8V supports Win98 on both. Does that
include drivers for a Dos Floppy to work with Ghost?

Can anyone with experience clarify the situation/solution about what is
needed to make the Ghost Dos floppy work with SATA/RAID? Is it possible
with the Asus motherboard?
 
The concern is about this Dos floppy for Ghost 7, or the newest version
Click to expand...
either, working with SATA/RAID? This definitely seems to rule >out the
MSI K8N, because the MSI K8N manual says "No win98 on >SATA" and says "No
Win98 on RAID". I think the Asus A8V supports Win98 on both. > Does that
include drivers for a Dos Floppy to work with Ghost?
Click to expand...


The reason 98 wont work on the MSI is because there are no SATA or SATA raid
drivers for 98 or ME. I dont know of any SATA raid controller that has
drivers for 98 or ME.
Most people are using the raid driver even if they sre only using 1 SATA
drive,the SATA drive needs some sort of SATA driver for it to work. I am not
aware of any OS with a SATA driver,so you have to install the SATA drivers at
F6. DOUG
 
Wayne said:
I'm planning to use SATA/RAID disks for the first time, with either a
Asus A8V or MSI K8N Neo2 motherboard, and an AMD64 cpu. I use Ghost for
system backups, which boots to a Dos floppy, and so the SATA/RAID is a
big concern for it. Can it still work?

The concern is about this Dos floppy for Ghost 7, or the newest version
either, working with SATA/RAID? This definitely seems to rule out the
MSI K8N, because the MSI K8N manual says "No win98 on SATA" and says "No
Win98 on RAID". I think the Asus A8V supports Win98 on both. Does that
include drivers for a Dos Floppy to work with Ghost?

Can anyone with experience clarify the situation/solution about what is
needed to make the Ghost Dos floppy work with SATA/RAID? Is it possible
with the Asus motherboard?
Click to expand...

I have a K8NE with raid setup on the sil 3114 sata ports with 2 disks.
Ghost 7.5 on a dos boot disk is able to see the drive and image and
restore partitions to the raid drive. So it should probably work for
you as well.

The only gottcha with Windows 2000 is that if you restore an image that
does not have the raid drivers installed in the Win2K image you made, it
will not boot as it will complain about no access to the boot drive.
 
Wayne said:
I'm planning to use SATA/RAID disks for the first time, with either a
Asus A8V or MSI K8N Neo2 motherboard, and an AMD64 cpu. I use Ghost for
system backups, which boots to a Dos floppy, and so the SATA/RAID is a
big concern for it. Can it still work?

The concern is about this Dos floppy for Ghost 7, or the newest version
either, working with SATA/RAID? This definitely seems to rule out the
MSI K8N, because the MSI K8N manual says "No win98 on SATA" and says "No
Win98 on RAID". I think the Asus A8V supports Win98 on both. Does that
include drivers for a Dos Floppy to work with Ghost?

Can anyone with experience clarify the situation/solution about what is
needed to make the Ghost Dos floppy work with SATA/RAID? Is it possible
with the Asus motherboard?
Click to expand...

I can't say for sure, but I suspect it will work since the controller
BIOS must have a basic DOS interface for the SATA/RAID controller to
allow the system to boot. It will likely be much slower than the normal
speed in Windows, but likely good enough.
 
KLH said:
I have a K8NE with raid setup on the sil 3114 sata ports with 2 disks.
Ghost 7.5 on a dos boot disk is able to see the drive and image and
restore partitions to the raid drive. So it should probably work for
Click to expand...
you as well.

The only gottcha with Windows 2000 is that if you restore an image that
does not have the raid drivers installed in the Win2K image you made, it
will not boot as it will complain about no access to the boot drive.
Click to expand...


Great! Thanks, that is encouraging, at least hopeful, so I will try to
expect it to work. Symantec is less encouraging, the URL is too long
to post, but see http://www.symantec.com/search then search for Ghost
Raid.
There's nothing like disk image for backups, so it's got to work :-)
 
Wayne said:
KLH wrote:





Great! Thanks, that is encouraging, at least hopeful, so I will try to
expect it to work. Symantec is less encouraging, the URL is too long
to post, but see http://www.symantec.com/search then search for Ghost
Raid.
Click to expand...

The document is outdated - Symantec hasn't fully digested PowerQuest as
yet :-)

PowerQuest's Drive Image worked with raid, albeit not officially
supported, for quite some time before Ghost caught up. Ghost 7 may well
work for you, but if not I recommend upgrading to Ghost 9 - which is
actually Drive Image V2i rebranded.

V2i finally does away with booting DOS for disk imaging. It can image
all partitions (including boot), and restore non-boot partitions,
without shutting down windows - and you can schedule it. If you tell it
to restore the boot partition, it asks for the product CD, then reboots
into a GUI recovery environment, restores the partition, and reboots
windows - it's quite slick ;-)
There's nothing like disk image for backups, so it's got to work :-)
Click to expand...

Disk image is a good start, but it's crude. On Solaris, you can create a
"flash archive", effectively a disk image which adapts to whatever
hardware is detected during restore, subject to user defined rules - so
I can restore my system on any available Sun hardware - that's *really*
slick ;-)

P2B
 
The document is outdated - Symantec hasn't fully digested PowerQuest as
yet :-)

PowerQuest's Drive Image worked with raid, albeit not officially
supported, for quite some time before Ghost caught up. Ghost 7 may well
work for you, but if not I recommend upgrading to Ghost 9 - which is
actually Drive Image V2i rebranded.

V2i finally does away with booting DOS for disk imaging. It can image
all partitions (including boot), and restore non-boot partitions,
without shutting down windows - and you can schedule it. If you tell it
to restore the boot partition, it asks for the product CD, then reboots
into a GUI recovery environment, restores the partition, and reboots
windows - it's quite slick ;-)
Click to expand...


Then Ghost 9 sounds really fine, to make floppy RAID/SATA drivers be
unimportant. Except for when the system disk wont boot of course.
Backup is pretty important then too. :-) So I'm sure hoping the Dos
floppy will be possible with the A8V RAID/SATA. It is sounding good.

Some say it should work, so I'll go for it. Thanks KLH for mentioning
that the existing backup data wont contain RAID drivers, to allow the new
RAID computer to boot. I'll just plan on installing the OS, then will
back that up once, and then try to restore that system from floppy, to be
sure restore works from floppy. I like the idea that the OS has to install
to RAID too, so there must be a way it can work, in some manner. It's
surely time for a clean disk restart anyway, not a problem when there is
no emergency.

I will update to 9, and should be able try it next week. Thanks for all
the good comments.
 
Wayne said:
Then Ghost 9 sounds really fine, to make floppy RAID/SATA drivers be
unimportant. Except for when the system disk wont boot of course.
Backup is pretty important then too. :-) So I'm sure hoping the Dos
floppy will be possible with the A8V RAID/SATA. It is sounding good.
Click to expand...

When the system disk won't boot, you just boot from the Ghost 9 product
CD and point it at the most recent backup manually. The only difference
is it doesn't already know where the most recent backup is - but in
either case the backup should be one taken on the current hardware.
Some say it should work, so I'll go for it. Thanks KLH for mentioning
that the existing backup data wont contain RAID drivers, to allow the new
RAID computer to boot. I'll just plan on installing the OS, then will
back that up once, and then try to restore that system from floppy, to be
sure restore works from floppy. I like the idea that the OS has to install
to RAID too, so there must be a way it can work, in some manner. It's
surely time for a clean disk restart anyway, not a problem when there is
no emergency.
Click to expand...

Good plan - in some cases disk imaging software can be used to migrate
systems to new hardware, but in general it wasn't designed to do that.
 
I have an A8V Deluxe, and I used Ghost 2003 to move data from a disk on
the IDE channel containing a WinXP partition to a SATA drive on the VIA
SATA controller and it worked fine. My assumption is that Ghost doesn't
depend upon any drivers for local disks, using instead BIOS calls. Since
the BIOS sees the SATA drive, Ghost can access it.
Click to expand...


That may be it somehow. I was very relieved to find that RAID does
work fine with Ghost too. My own eyes have seen that that booting on a
Ghost 2003 floppy sees the AV8 Promise RAID 0 partitions - no apparent
issue at all. Just boot on the Ghost 2003 floppy and there you are, works
like always before, couldnt be better. I easily copied a SATA RAID 0
partition to a Ghost image file on a second PATA drive (via Ghost 2003
floppy boot). Even now that I have done it once, I'm still amazed that
it works. RAID and/or SATA simply doesnt seem to matter to the Ghost
2003 user. Ghost 9 is probably fine too, I have not tried it yet.

I was a disbeliver, didnt see how Ghost RAID could work without drivers,
but it does! I knew XP install works too, but it asks for RAID drivers.
So I was really worried about RAID backup, but Ghost works as is - the
only problem was my lack of faith. :-) Speed with maximum compression
was about 850MB/sec to one (VIA PATA) 7200 rpm WD 120GB drive (AMD 3500
cpu). Since Ghost backup is not an issue, then there seems no reason not
to use RAID, at least not on the AV8.

The AV8 Deluxe works OK, but I have more problems this time than ever
before (not disk related). Maybe someone has solved them already?

Matrox G550 video card will no longer allow the AV8 XP system to boot
after XP SP2 is installed. I've installed fresh XP at least a dozen times
trying different things, but G550 driver + SP2 = No boot. VIA 4.55 and
no VIA AGP did not help me. Other K8T800Pro motherboards appear to have
the same G550/SP2 problem.

SP1 is installed for USB, and Device Manager shows 5 USB hubs, one PCI to
USB Host controller, and 4 VIA Universal Host Controllers. If I plug a
USB printer into any USB port, XP sees it immediately and announces a new
found device, so something works. However the Add Printer box does not
show any USB ports to be selected? (so install cannot proceed). Shows
all manner of other port choices except USB.

The Ghost 2003 peer-to-peer via LAN setup wants a driver for the AV8
Marvel LAN chip. The AV8 CD does not satisfy it. Visible complaint is
that it wants an oemsetup.inf file.

Any ideas? Thanks
 
Wayne said:
That may be it somehow. I was very relieved to find that RAID does
work fine with Ghost too. My own eyes have seen that that booting on a
Ghost 2003 floppy sees the AV8 Promise RAID 0 partitions - no apparent
issue at all. Just boot on the Ghost 2003 floppy and there you are, works
like always before, couldnt be better. I easily copied a SATA RAID 0
partition to a Ghost image file on a second PATA drive (via Ghost 2003
floppy boot). Even now that I have done it once, I'm still amazed that
it works. RAID and/or SATA simply doesnt seem to matter to the Ghost
2003 user. Ghost 9 is probably fine too, I have not tried it yet.

I was a disbeliver, didnt see how Ghost RAID could work without drivers,
but it does! I knew XP install works too, but it asks for RAID drivers.
So I was really worried about RAID backup, but Ghost works as is - the
only problem was my lack of faith. :-) Speed with maximum compression
was about 850MB/sec to one (VIA PATA) 7200 rpm WD 120GB drive (AMD 3500
cpu). Since Ghost backup is not an issue, then there seems no reason not
to use RAID, at least not on the AV8.

The AV8 Deluxe works OK, but I have more problems this time than ever
before (not disk related). Maybe someone has solved them already?

Matrox G550 video card will no longer allow the AV8 XP system to boot
after XP SP2 is installed. I've installed fresh XP at least a dozen times
trying different things, but G550 driver + SP2 = No boot. VIA 4.55 and
no VIA AGP did not help me. Other K8T800Pro motherboards appear to have
the same G550/SP2 problem.

SP1 is installed for USB, and Device Manager shows 5 USB hubs, one PCI to
USB Host controller, and 4 VIA Universal Host Controllers. If I plug a
USB printer into any USB port, XP sees it immediately and announces a new
found device, so something works. However the Add Printer box does not
show any USB ports to be selected? (so install cannot proceed). Shows
all manner of other port choices except USB.

The Ghost 2003 peer-to-peer via LAN setup wants a driver for the AV8
Marvel LAN chip. The AV8 CD does not satisfy it. Visible complaint is
that it wants an oemsetup.inf file.

Any ideas? Thanks
Click to expand...
Wayne,
On your printer issue, I believe you have to install some driver
software from the printer manufacturer before it will properly load.
Once the software has been loaded it will trigger some additional
entries under the USB section of Device Manager and elsewhere, when the
printer is turned on. Something to the effect of "USB Printer Support"
and/or "USB Composite device should show up. Without the drivers,
Windows gives you the device connect tone and nothing further, as you've
seen, due to the lack of the OEM support drivers to bridge the system. HTH.
Rob
 
Rob said:
Wayne,
On your printer issue, I believe you have to install some driver
software from the printer manufacturer before it will properly load.
Once the software has been loaded it will trigger some additional
entries under the USB section of Device Manager and elsewhere, when the
printer is turned on. Something to the effect of "USB Printer Support"
and/or "USB Composite device should show up. Without the drivers,
Windows gives you the device connect tone and nothing further, as you've
seen, due to the lack of the OEM support drivers to bridge the system. HTH.
Rob
Click to expand...


This correct, you generally have to install the driver first before
hooking up a USB printer. Most driver installation disks will tell you
when to turn on the printer.
 
Wayne Fulton wrote:
[Snip]
The AV8 Deluxe works OK, but I have more problems this time than ever
before (not disk related). Maybe someone has solved them already?


SP1 is installed for USB, and Device Manager shows 5 USB hubs, one PCI to
USB Host controller, and 4 VIA Universal Host Controllers. If I plug a
USB printer into any USB port, XP sees it immediately and announces a new
found device, so something works. However the Add Printer box does not
show any USB ports to be selected? (so install cannot proceed). Shows
all manner of other port choices except USB.
Click to expand...

You need to install the printer driver for the USB printer before you
turn on the printer.

The Ghost 2003 peer-to-peer via LAN setup wants a driver for the AV8
Marvel LAN chip. The AV8 CD does not satisfy it. Visible complaint is
that it wants an oemsetup.inf file.

Any ideas? Thanks
Click to expand...

Not the same motherboard but ASUS does have a DOS driver on their site
for the the Marvell lan.

http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4P800 SE

Download the file Marvell_other.zip, even thought it only lists SCO
Unix/Sun Solaris/Linux, the zip file also contains a DOS driver for this
Lan adapter.
 
On your printer issue, I believe you have to install some driver
software from the printer manufacturer before it will properly load.
Once the software has been loaded it will trigger some additional
entries under the USB section of Device Manager and elsewhere, when the
printer is turned on. Something to the effect of "USB Printer Support"
and/or "USB Composite device should show up. Without the drivers,
Windows gives you the device connect tone and nothing further, as you've
seen, due to the lack of the OEM support drivers to bridge the system. HTH.
Rob
Click to expand...

Thanks all, that was it, installing the printer driver did it. And now the
Add Printer box shows that one USB port, but no others. I really dont
remember XP being that way before, but I only had 2 USB ports before. :)
 
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