Ghost Boot Wizard Fails at Preparing Disks

Written by James McDonald

August 17, 2012

Just spent an unproductive morning try to get the Ghost Boot Wizard (version 11.5.1.2266) to copy a winpe image to a Vebatim 4GB USB Key (NG04G2520005743DML)

I would go through the wizard and when I got to the end and it said “Preparing Disks” GBW would exit – no errors, no event logs. It didn’t matter what settings I tried in the GBW it would exit everytime after displaying “Preparing Disks”

I am running Windows 7 64bit with the latest service packs as at today. (17/8/2012).

I tried:
Formatting and Quick Formatting the USB Key with different file systems Fat32, NTFS etc but same result.

Running LiveUpdate to check if I had the latest version of Ghost and it said I did.

Replace USB key with a larger 8GB but same brand of USB Drive and same problem (NG08G2520012833DML).

Searched Google and Symantec but the answer, if it was there, was buried too deep for me to find.

The fix 1 – Use a different brand of USB Key
Used a SanDisk Cruzer 8GB USB key (SDCZ36-008G BI1109ZMIB) and it worked fine

The fix 2 – Use diskpart to clean the configuration of the Verbatim Key/s

You can clean the USB key of all configuration settings which will allow GBW to complete.

On Windows 7 do the following:

  1. Plug the Verbatim USB key into your computer
  2. Launch a command prompt
  3. Type “diskpart” and press enter
  4. Type “list disk” and press enter
  5. Identify your USB key (usually it will be the smallest size) i.e. 3823MB
  6. Type “Select disk 2” and press enter. Replace “2” with the number of your USB key if it’s different
  7. Type “clean” and press enter
  8. Type “exit” and press enter

Here is  what you should see as you enter the above commands

C:\Users\user>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: MYW7PC

DISKPART> list disks

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601

DISK - Display a list of disks. For example, LIST DISK.
PARTITION - Display a list of partitions on the selected disk.
For example, LIST PARTITION.
VOLUME - Display a list of volumes. For example, LIST VOLUME.
VDISK - Displays a list of virtual disks.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 931 GB 3072 KB
Disk 2 Online 3823 MB 0 B

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

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