SteadyState and Ghost Console
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Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:40 PM
Has anyone had any issues with Ghost Console not rebooting into the Virtual Partition after Disk Protection has been turned on?
I’ve not spent a lot of time troubleshooting this yet (so I could be wrong), but what is happening is after Disk Protection has been turned on, if I go to re-image my systems from Ghost Console, it will reboot and then give the error “Error loading operating system”. Using the same images but Disk Protection off, the systems reboot correctly and re-images fine. My Disk Protection is set to retain changes until midnight, so I’m pretty sure what is happening is Disk Protection is caching all the changes except for the MBR.
If I set Disk Protection to retain all changes permanently, will they be committed to the disk immediately or will they be cached first and then written on the next reboot?
**Hint Hint Microsoft** Hurry up and get Server 2008 released so I can multicast WIM files.
All Replies
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Monday, August 20, 2007 8:14 AM
Hi JC,
Please note that VCFFltr.sys (the driver that implements the disk protection) manages a list of file fragments that make up the cache file and a list of sectors to exclude from caching. Windows Disk Protection (WDP) needs to track the list of the file fragments and the list of exclude sectors directly. The driver operates below NTFS and is unable to perform regular file operations on the cache file. As a result, the cache file is very sensitive to the fragmentation level of the disk and the health state of the file system. Unless the cache file is copied to a hard drive whose physical layout exactly matches the source disk, the cache file will not work. Thus, it is not recommended to enable WDP before capturing an image.
You can also refer to this thread for more related information:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsToolsandUtilities/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1815384&SiteID=69
Best Regards,
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007 1:12 AM
The Reference image already has disk protection turned off. I was attempting to wipe out the current computer with the new image. The current computer had disk protection on. This is just one of those things I'll have to wait until SteadyState 2.5 is released.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007 7:46 AM
Hello Customer,
According to the symptoms, Ghost Console seems to be incompatible with WDP of SteadyState.
If WDP is enabled, when a disk I/O request reaches the volume driver, WDP intercepts it. If the I/O is a read, and the sector requested exists in the cache file, the data is retrieved from the cache file, otherwise it’s retrieved from its original location on disk. If the I/O is a write, the data is stored in the cache file instead of in the specified sector. When the system boots up, WDP checks the current mode. If it’s in Discard mode (Remove All Changes at Restart), the structures that locate sectors in the cache file are initialized, and the cache is treated as empty. If it’s in persist mode (Retain Changes Temporarily), the existing locator structures are used, so the currently cached data is used. If it’s in commit mode (Retain All Changes Permanently), WDP iterates through the contents of the cache file, copying all the cached data from the cache file to the sector that it was originally intended for on disk. After this is done, WDP waits for the system to finish booting up and then restarts. This restart is necessary because during boot, Windows has loaded a copy of the registry’s system hive before WDP was loaded.
As the WDP is configured in Persist mode, the modification is stored in cache file and will not write to the disk. If the Ghost Console depends on modified information during reboot, it may have some problems. Unfortunately, as we do not have Ghost Console and do not know exactly how it works, we could not provide a conclusion.
Consider the current condition, we suggest you turn off the WDP before you use Ghost.
Thanks and have a nice day.
