Mounting Ghost images

kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

Hi. I've got Linux running decently one my laptop (still working on WPA, but that's another issue...).

Anyway, I'd like to put Windows back on it, but it came with one f those crappy OEM versions of windows which will format the entire drive if I install it normally. After browsing the installation CD, I believe that the OS resides in one of several .ghs files or possibly a .gho file. I'd like to mount these files so that I can browse them to see which one to install. Can anyone explain how to do this?

I would also need to install the required file onto the partition that is reserved for Windows.

Any help would be appreciated.
_________________
God save us from His followers.

i92guboj · Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 3:04 am Post subject:

I remember someone looking for the same thing in these forums, and AFAIK he never got a solution.

I doubt that thing has changed, since the ghost format is propietary, close, and symantec is not willing to provide the specifications. Thing would be different is more people had this need hehe, surely someone could reverse it to make a kernel fs module, or something, but as far as I know such a thing does not exist for ghost files.

I 'd like to be wrong...

kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

Hmm. I hope you are wrong, too. Anyone know anything different? Anyone have any idea about a work around?
_________________
God save us from His followers.

phorn · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 01 Jul 2006 Posts: 109

First of all, it would be easier to use ghost to do this, since that's probably how you created them.

Most likely, unless you used compression when you created the ghost images, they will be stored in the file, at a certain offset.

I recommend using a hex editor to do this.
I have had different experiences with many editors for things like this.
You can try ghex2, hexedit (console), and probably a number of other ones.

You may want to extract the first megabyte or so from the file:

i92guboj · Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 8:09 am Post subject:

I never tried anything like that, but maybe you can run ghost under wine. It has a DOS based part, I think that, at least that, should run ok under wine or dosemu... Never tried it myself, though. Just came to my mind five minutes ago and I figured that maybe it would worth to try it.

kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I wish that I had created the images myself. Then I could get them back easily. Actually they came as part of a recovery disk that Toshiba (stay away from Toshiba, guys) sent with my laptop.

As to doing ls -l to see which file actually had the data, I tried that. The strange thing is that several of the files had file sizes in excess of 600MB!

Strange, huh? I can only guess that some are hard links (which I didn't know were possible under iso 9660). It gets even weirder, though. The large files don't have the same sizes! Toshiba is doing some strange things with their filesystem.

Another option that has occured to me but which I haven't had time to try is to reverse engineer Toshibas recovery cd to use whatever mechanism they use to extract the Ghost images. That could be a serious pain in the ass, but it would be sweet to distribute a reasonable to use Toshiba recovery CD.
_________________
God save us from His followers.

devsk · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:56 am Post subject:

it may be pretty late but one option is to extract and restore ghost images inside vmware. you can download a win98 dos install with CDROM driver and install it within VMWare. Re-partition your main hard drive using livecd and make the first primary partition as big as you want to give to windows xp. Restore your linux onto other partitions. Run vmware in linux, add the physical disk to the win98 virtual machine and boot the win98 VM. Then, insert your CD and find the ghost.exe on the CD and run it. Save the image partition onto the first partition of your main hard drive. You should now be able to modify grub to boot XP from 1st partition.

daddio · Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 2:34 pm Post subject: Reinstall windows

Again this reply may come WAAAY too late, but you don't need toshiba's restore disks unless you simply must have the silly applications (MS Works Suite anyone?) that they may have thrown in. You need a windows XP OEM disk, (NOT Retail, Not upgrade and Not the infamous corporate/bulk license). If you know someone with a custom PC they probably have it and could burn you a copy, or a smaller computer shop might be willing to burn you a copy for a fee.

It would work with the OEM sticker on the bottom of your laptop

You would still need to get drivers from toshiba... but