Ghost Restore

[Gagliano]

I've got a problem that I'm quite sure how to address. I've seen several sites that suggest how to do it, but none quite fit my predicament.

I need to upgrade some software on a hundred or so old NT machines for a customer. One key piece of development software is no longer available (trust me, they've searched everywhere), but the development environment does exist within a ghost backup from an old PC they had (which no longer exists) when they bought the other machines.

What I want to do is somehow restore this ghost image into a new VMware Workstation 8 machine. How would you attack this? I don't know the version of Ghost that was used, but the INF file says it was created in Feb 2000. Would I first create a new VMware machine, and boot it with a Norton Ghost boot disk? I haven't used Norton Ghost for a long, long time, and don't remember the intricacies. Can I just use any version to create a boot disk? I really don't want to install Norton on my PC because some Symantec stuff doesn't play well with some of my other software and I will never need Ghost again, but the customer might be able to create one from whatever version they are using. Once I have restored this Ghost image, I'll be able to make changes and push them down to the other PCs.

I've also seen references to some command line scripts that would convert the GHO to a VMDK file, but there were all kinds of qualifiers, and it didn't seem like it would work in my case.

This is just one of those oddball things I run into every ten years, and I was hoping some IT guy would know what I'm talking about.

 

[Harry Hooper]

I believe the compact disc that came with Ghost (circa 2001) on it was bootable itself, so probably no need to create a boot disk. I have the original Ghost software in a file cabinet somewhere.

The customer has hundreds of old NT machines, but these aren't the same or close kin to the PC that the image was created on? Do you know the specs/model of that imaged PC. I (or somebody else) might have a match in deep storage.


Also, this link might be helpful

 

[Gagliano]

Thanks Harry! Sent you a PM....

 

[AlNipper49]

That's correct. There are probably also Ghost converters to throw it into VHD or whatever virtualization you are using

 

[Gagliano]

When you said "That's correct", what were you referring to? The fact that the Ghost CD is bootable?

I downloaded the VMware converter, but it doesn't support GHO images as a source. Harry is sending me some stuff too, so one way or another I'll get this working. I'll document and post the results for posterity.

 

[Harry Hooper]

A timely article over at TechRepublic:

Steve Kleynhans, research VP with analyst house Gartner, said it wasn't that unusual for pockets of machines within organisations to be running very old operating systems.
...
Often it can be the case that organisations can't update the application to run on a newer OS because the people with the necessary skills are gone or the company that originally wrote the software no longer exists, he said.

"They know the application will be retired in 2016 or some future date and they're just holding on until they can actually close it down and move it out."

There may still be pockets of XP within many organisations, when Microsoft dropped support for XP in April 2014, more than three-quarters of businesses in the UK were still running the venerable OS somewhere within their IT estate, according to one survey.

"When you're a big company or a big organisation, projects don't happen quickly. You may have seen it [the end of support for an OS] coming since 2013 and said 'We're going to shut this application down because it's not worth updating it to the new operating system but the quickest we can shut it down is 2016," he said.

Kleynhans has seen organisations clinging on to operating systems from even longer ago.

"I ran into a company just a few weeks ago that was still running something on Windows 98 and it was a production system. They couldn't replace it, it did one task and one task very well. They were sitting there thinking 'What happens when the machine breaks?'"

 

[Gagliano]

Yeah, one of my customers still has over 200 Windows NT computers running software that won't port over to XP, and they don't plan on phasing them out for 8 more years. Another still uses UNIX and DOS PCs to do critical tasks, and there are no plans to replace them. There is so much of that stuff out there, and it's like going back in a time machine when you get on one of these PCs and see a Netscape icon.

 

[JerBear]

I use OS2 warp and Unix for plant critical systems at work. Migration plan is over the next 6 years. Backup plan is a VM that probably won't even work.

 

[Duende Roomer]

What's the development software piece?

 

[Gagliano]

Due to confidentiality agreements I can't give out explicit info, but it was a software package that was developed explicitly for NT, but the next version was developed for Windows 2000 and wasn't backward compatible, nor is the first version forward compatible. I guess the developers assumed that everyone would just upgrade hardware and software over the years, but it isn't always that easy. And right now they have several thousand XP computers that are not going away for at least another ten years.

And last night I was having a beer with a software engineer from a major communications and marketing company that I guarantee everyone here knows, and we were talking about this exact thing. They have enormous data centers using Sql Server and Oracle, but they still have a few old data centers using DB2 (the Ashton-Tate version) and Unix. Some old guy out there has a job forever.

 

[AlNipper49]

Since your stuff tends to be specific can you use something like this? We use it for a few things, in a few instances and it works well.

https://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp

 

[Red Sox Physicist]

they still have a few old data centers using DB2 (the Ashton-Tate version) and Unix. Some old guy out there has a job forever.

? DB2 is IBM's database. Ashton-Tate did dBASE.

DB2 is actually still around and under active development. I even prefer it to Oracle or SQL Server. When I've found bugs in the database, IBM was much easier to work with than Oracle.

 

[Gagliano]

Since your stuff tends to be specific can you use something like this? We use it for a few things, in a few instances and it works well.

https://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp

Hmmm, I'll download it and try it out. I'll see what it does with some of this old stuff.

? DB2 is IBM's database. Ashton-Tate did dBASE.

DB2 is actually still around and under active development. I even prefer it to Oracle or SQL Server. When I've found bugs in the database, IBM was much easier to work with than Oracle.

Sorry, I meant dBase II. He specifically mentioned that, and I was familiar with it because I worked on a POS that used it, and then I did some dBase III+ work later (that actually wasn't bad). I had DB2 on the brain when I typed that.