Member Avatar for GriffIT34

Why doesn't it work? I have several laptops IBM's image fine with ghost 8.2 but with dell's it loads the drivers (using floppy disks) i get to the second disk which loads ghost.exe. Then the ghost program loads and i get that grey background overlaying a blue background with an hour glass'd cursor but thats it. No movement nothing anyone know why dell is so difficult, besides the obvious answer that its a DELL!!


Thanks for any idea's

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by darrglud

Dani AI

Generated

This thread from drew a couple of good hypotheses from and . The answers below add a few concrete, low-risk steps and a practical WinPE workflow that usually fixes Ghost hangs on modern laptop storage controllers.

Start with a quick checklist (stop after the first thing that works):

  • Note the exact storage controller shown in the laptop BIOS or in Windows Device Manager (vendor/model). That identifies which driver the boot environment must provide.
  • Try a boot image that supports Windows drivers (WinPE/BartPE + Ghost32) instead of plain DOS-based Ghost. DOS environments often lack drivers for many SATA/AHCI/RAID controllers.
  • Build a WinPE image with the vendor mass-storage and network drivers injected, copy ghost32.exe into the image, and boot the laptop from that USB/CD. Ghost32 under WinPE will use the injected Windows drivers and usually avoids the hang.
  • If WinPE is not an option, try a more modern imaging tool that natively supports a wide range of controllers (Clonezilla, Acronis) or a Symantec Ghost build updated for newer hardware.

Practical WinPE workflow (high level):

  • Create WinPE with the Microsoft ADK.
  • Add the correct storage and NIC drivers for the laptop model into the WinPE WIM.
  • Copy Ghost32.exe into the WinPE file system and build a bootable USB.
  • Boot the laptop, confirm the storage device is visible in WinPE, then run Ghost32 to image/restore.

Notes and cautions:

  • Do not overwrite any vendor recovery partition unless you intend to remove it; back up important data first.
  • Record BIOS SATA-mode before changes so you can revert.
  • If unsure which driver to use, capture the controller ID and search the laptop vendor support site for the exact driver package for that model.

This approach avoids physically removing drives and addresses the driver/boot-environment gap that commonly causes Ghost to hang.

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Member Avatar for darrglud

Could you please clarify your question?

Member Avatar for GriffIT34

Well the question would be why ghost doesn't work on any of the dell laptops that I have.

Update, i was able to ghost my dell hard drives by physically removing them from the laptop and attaching them to desktops and creating/restoring the image from there.

Hope this helps anyone else who has the problem

Member Avatar for Spriggan

correct me if i'm wrong here...

dell likes to sometimes install 1 HDD using a proprietary software RAID BIOS... this will confuse ghost. So, maybe new Motherboard = new BIOS settings.

Member Avatar for darrglud

i think ur right, but it might be confused by Dell's hidden partition too?

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