Need advanced Ghost 2001/bootable CD help

[mallarj]

My goal is to create a Ghost image of my new laptop so that if I have to restore, I just pop in a CD and click restore (or something similar).

Now the problem. I have no FD on this PC (it's an optional USB component I don't have yet).

I can't use Ghost because when it creates a bootable restore CD, it expects to copy the boot image from a floppy. Since my laptop doesn't have a floopy, this is problematic. I do have a network to another PC with floppy, but unless I am missing something, I don't see how I can access that floppy from the DOS mode that is brought up when Ghost starts (when I create the image).

I've got Adaptec's Easy CD Creator. I actually have two versions. On my laptop I have v5.1.1. On one of the networked PCs I have 4.02.

I tried using one of my desktops to create a bootable CD. EasyCD doesn't seem to have a problem, it reads the floppy image, I copy the ghost specific stuff to id and write the CD. However when I put it in my laptop CD drive and try to boot, it complains about NTLD. I'm guessing here, but maybe that's because my desktop has Win2k with NTFS, and my laptop has Win2k with FAT32.

I managed to get an image of the floppy on my desktop. Basically, I created a bootable CD from EasyCD 4.02 and copied the Ghost stuff to it again, but saved the image file instead of writing the CD.

I then took this image file and copied it to my laptop. I then tried to use the Easy CD creator there (v5.1.1) to write that image to a CD.

It worked fine, but neither my laptop or my desktop can boot it up. The desktop seems to recognize the image as a FD emulation boot floppy, but just sits there. The laptop just sits there, no messages at all.

I am using a CDRW instead of aCDROM, but I can't imagine that would matter, both PCs have CDRW capability.

Help! I use my laptop for travelling, and if something goes wrong, I want to be able to pop in a Ghost created image and restore my system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-
Jay

[cobra]

"However when I put it in my laptop CD drive and try to boot, it complains about NTLD"

If that's the case, then most li9kely your laptop is not set to boot to cd. If it is set to boot to the cdrom, then it would try to boot from cd (if the cd did not have dos on it to boot, it would give you a different error, I forget exactly which one).
I wish I could help you out with ezcd, but I use Nero, and have made MANY a bootable "ghost" cd's from it.
In ghost will it let you copy the boot files from another directory or drive other than "a"? I can't remember, have not "ghosted" in about a year (whew) :P
lmk

[mallarj]

It's defitnely set to boot from CD, and other CDs work.