Transition Away From DOS
The off-line version of Ghost, which runs from bootable media in place of the installed operating system, originally faced a number of driver support difficulties due to limitations of the increasingly obsolete 16-bit DOS environment.
Driver selection and configuration within DOS was non-trivial from the beginning, and the limited space available on floppy disks made disk cloning of several different disk controllers a difficult task, where different SCSI, USB, and CD-ROM drives were involved. Mouse support was possible but often left out due to the limited space for drivers on a floppy disk..
Some devices such as USB often did not work using newer features such as USB 2.0, instead only operating at 1.0 speeds and taking hours to do what should have taken only a few minutes. As widespread support for DOS went into decline, it became increasingly difficult to get hardware drivers for DOS for the newer hardware.
Disk imaging competitors to Ghost have dealt with the decline of DOS by moving to Linux based preboot environments, where they can draw on the driver development for the Linux kernel to be able to image newer models of disk controllers. Nevertheless the DOS version of Ghost on compatible hardware configurations works much faster than most of the Linux based image and backup tools.
Eventually Ghost was rewritten as Ghost32.exe, a 32-bit version capable of running with the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE), which is a stripped down version of Windows originally used by product manufacturers to set up new computers. Because WinPE was based on the modern 32-bit Windows, it could use the same plug and play hardware drivers as a standard desktop computer, making hardware support for Ghost much simpler.
Ghost32.exe is also compatible with BartPE (Bart's Preinstalled Environment) a Windows XP based Live CD created using the PE Builder. To integrate Ghost32.exe into BartPE a PE Builder plug-in for Ghost is available.
Read more about this topic: Ghost (software)
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