I use Symantec's Ghost 2003 to create image backups of disk drives. Since the Ghost 2003 Boot Wizard can't create bootable CD's, only boot floppy disks, I create a boot floppy disk and then use a program like Nero or Roxio Easy Easy CD Creator, which can create boot CDs from floppy diskettes, to create a Ghost 2003 boot CD (see Procedure for Generating Norton Ghost Bootable CD for procedure to use with Roxio's Easy CD and DVD Creator 6). When I booted systems from the boot CD's I created I would see the message below:
Write protect error writing drive A Abort, Retry, Fail?
I would hit F and the boot process would proceed. If I hit R,
I would get the same message again. Hitting A for "Abort" would
allow me to proceed to running Ghost, but the mouse driver wouldn't load.
If I hit F8 just as I was booting from the Ghost 2003 boot CD, I could
walk through the commands in config.sys and
autoexec.bat, which allowed me to see that the error occurred
just as the mouse driver was being loaded.
I didn't know how to eliminate the error until I found the cause of the problem described by eASYkILL in a posting at Ghost 2003 Multi-Boot CD (Abort,Retry,Fail) error. He posted the following information:
So here is the deal... MOUSE.COM is trying to create a MOUSE.INI file and because you created a bootable CD (read-only) it is unable to write the file and gives the error message (Abort, Retry, Fail). If you fail, you can continue just fine with mouse support.
The solution... add a MOUSE.INI to your floppy that you are creating the image from. If you booted from the floppy at least once, this problem doesn't occur because the file is created. That may be how it went away for you. Just re-create the bootable CD from the floppy with mouse.ini added.
Here is my mouse.ini
[mouse]
MouseType=PS2
Cheers!Since most of the systems on which I'm performing the Ghost 2003 image backups have a mouse attached by the PS/2 mouse port, I thought that should work fine. So I used
Notepadto create amouse.inifile with the above lines on one of the Ghost 2003 boot floppy disks (be sure to change the "save as type" to "all files", if using the Windows Notepad program). I also found that I was able to boot laptops with a built-in mouse touchpad and use use the mouse with no problems with the mouse type set to PS2 inmouse.ini. I no longer received the "Abort, retry, or fail" message when booting from a Ghost 2003 boot CD that had themouse.inifile in the root directory.Note: you can see optons for the
. You can specify the mouse type by using themouse.comprogram by typingmouse /?at a command prompt. You can usemouse offto remove the mouse driver from memory.typeoption.mouse type /Cn (serial), /Z (PS2), /In (inPort), /B (bus) (n specifies a prot and can be either 1 or 2)References:
