Help booting Symantec Rescue Disk - not enough memory to create ramdisk device
I use Ghost 15 and it usually works great (I run Ghost recovery off a bootable grub4dos usb stick). I recently performed a cold backup of a PC using the Ghost 15 recovery environment. When restoring the backup from the Ghost recovery environment to the same PC, as the restore was 99% completed, I was prompted to enter an additional disk. Of course, I didn't have the disk the restore process was looking for and the restore process returned an error and did not successfully complete.
I understand that this is a bug in Ghost 15 and that the restore process somehow thinks I'm restoring to a different machine and is looking for files from Symantec's PC Anywhere. So I did as has been suggested in this forum and downloaded the Symantec Rescue Disk that comes with Symantec System Restore 2013. I copied the 32-bit ISO to my USB stick and created the following entry in menu.lst:
# Symantec System Recovery - Symantec Recovery Disk
title Symantec Recovery Disk
find --set-root /ISO/SSR11.0.1.47662_AllWin_English_SrdOnly.iso
map /ISO/SSR11.0.1.47662_AllWin_English_SrdOnly.iso (hd32)
map --hook
root (hd32)
chainloader (hd32)
The iso is contiguous on the USB stick. When launching, I immediately receive the following error message:
"There isn't enough memory available to create a ramdisk device." Error code is 0xc0000017
The system in question has 512MB of memory. I am able to boot the Ghost 15 ISO from the same USB stick and it's larger at 394MB while the SRD ISO is 381MB.
Any suggestions?
The problem your seeing is indeed a bug that happens with Ghost 15 when trying to restore a "cold image" made from the recovery disk.
As you stated, Ghost 15 "thinks" that your restoring the image onto a different system and tries to do a "restore anywhere". This only happens with images made from the recovery disc because the restore anywhere feature is disabled in the program when making images from inside windows.
When it tells you to insert the recovery disk, it's looking for the driver database that is not present on the Ghost 15 recovery disc. Since it can't find the database it asks for the recovery disc because it thinks you don't have it in the system. SSR discs have a folder "DDB" that is not present on the Ghost discs.
Like Andy mentioned, at that point the recovery is normally done and in "most" cases you can simply reboot the system and it will boot windows with no problems. However in some cases the first part of the restore anywhere process has begun and you will find that some changes have been made to windows, the network adapters and USB devices have been removed and when windows reinstalls those devices you have lost any LAN and WiFi settings and passwords.
There are 3 ways to get around this problem. One is to do the restore with a SSR 2011 recovery disc and uncheck the option to do the "restore anywhere". Second option is to use a Ghost 14 recovery disc. Third option is to only make images from inside windows.
The SSR 2011 disc is based on Vista just like the Ghost 15 disc so it's not going to require more RAM like the SSR 2013 disc needs being based on Windows 7.
BTW- booting the ISO with Grub has noting to do with the problem your seeing, I do the same thing on a couple of my systems. I also have an XP system that does the exact same thing whenever I do a restore from a cold image.
Dave
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