# Auto Ghost



## matt_aj (Jan 23, 2006)

I need to create a bootable cd that automatically will copy an image (from same cd) to the machine without intervention. The image is fairly small (430MB). I just want to pop in the cd, boot the machine and have it automatically copy from the cd to the machine. It sounds simple in theory, but it's tough to find where to start. Any body shed some light on this?


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

What image software are you using, GHOST?

If you have GHOST 2003, you can use the command line option and create a bootable CD that should do the trick. You need to create a floppy boot image that has the proper commands in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to load the CD drivers and invoke GHOST with the command line options. I did something just like this a few years back.


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## StumpedTechy (Jul 7, 2004)

Here is how I usually do it with ghost. Again I do use corperate versions so I am not sure if this will work 100% if your using a home version.

1) On the machine you want to ghost to make sure your boot order is CD-HDD-Yadda yadda yadda
2) Make a dos bootable floppy disk with cd rom drivers I just usualy use a windows 98 boot floppy.
Then I edit the autoexec bat and I do something like this -

for %%b in (C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) do if exist %%b:\DRIVE.ID set SRCDRV=%%b

The above line allows you to set the drive letter based on any file name you want so you can change Drive.ID to be ANY filesname you want I like Drive.ID

then for the ghost command line I do 

%SRCDRV%:\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%SRCDRV%:\ghostimagename.gho,dst=1 -sure -rb

3) Save these changes to the autoexec bat.
4) Make the cd. A) Create a bootable CD from an image file and this is where you supply the modified floppy. B) in the CD compilation make sure you have ghost.exe, the ghost image and the drive.id file (or whatever name you chose in step 3.
5) Once you have the CD burnt put it in the PC with the CD-Rom boot first and it will auto install the ghost image you created.


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## matt_aj (Jan 23, 2006)

Awesome... I will give that a try. Thanks!


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

Wow, a cookbook solution!  I was looking around to see if I still had the stuff from when I did this, glad someone came through with it.

FWIW, the personal version of GHOST also has the extensive command line parameters, so I think this should work with it as well.


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