Ghost machines without...Ghost...

[Samson]

WE have 2 IT rooms, all with Old W2k machines with 256MB ram.

Norton Ghost requires a Min. 512MB ram.

Upgrading is out of the question due to money concerns.

Over the summer holidays, I want to reformat one computer, set it up, install everything, all the software, then duplicate its hard drive in a Norton Ghost manner onto every other IT machine, a process which I can simply then re-duplicate each machine every half term or so, to keep everything running smoothly and problem-free.

What I need is some sort of solution like this, maybe a CD (*nix live cd?), that I can boot from once I've got the machine setup how I want it, create an "image" of the hard drive, and save it over the network. Then I can put the same CD in each machine, pull the image off the network, and duplicate it onto the computers.

Are there any solutions around like this? Free? Open-Source?

Eager to hear back!

[Geoff]

Partimage?

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

You'll need an FTP server to store the images on (IIS can do this).
You'll need to scandisk, defrag and sysprep prior to imaging.

[DMcCoy]

Which version of ghost are you using? Corporate or commercial? Corporate doesn't even need the ghost console client if you only want to use it to deploy the image and not software afterwards.

I was doing a PXE guide but got distacted by trying to workout how to create a boot image without having first made it on a RIS enabled server.

[craiglay]

I have a BartPE disk and a program called DriveImage XML. That works a treat for me and is free. You just need to set up the BartPE disk and there are instructions on the driveimage site to integrate it into BartPE.

If needed, you can integrate the MMC disk management plugin into BartPE to manage your drives and with a little more work, it is possible to load BartPE over RIS (I need to write some instructions of how i did it first)

Craig

[joem]

Hi all,

I'm in a software test house where we 'Ghost' kits all day long.

We use a "Ghost disk" and have Ghost on a server.
The Ghost disk is a bootable floppy with DOS and network drivers. It installs DOS, installs the network drivers, maps a drive to the server, and runs Ghost from there. The server is also where we keep our disk images.
Our oldest kit is a P233 with 32MB of RAM, and we've been using this solution since the days when a 200MB HDD was like a wide savanah...

Recently one of our systems bods has created a CD version which loads itself to RAM. It is *much* quicker, but the principle is the same.

Note that if you have multiple disks they all need a different network name or you won't be able to use them at the same time.

I guess you could do this with other imaging software too, but have never tried it.

If you use the solution you are suggesting to duplicate one machine image across many machines, you need to make sure that the hardware is identical, otherwise you'll be installing drivers until you go bonkers.
You also will need to change the name of each machine manually after ghosting to avoid them all being called PC01 or whatever (Networks are fussy, as I'm sure you know!)

With high compression on Ghosting, a clean installation of W2K SP4 uses about 450MB of server space. And your server needn't be a *proper* server - just another machine on the network.

If your hardware specs aren't identical it's worth having an image for each machine, they'll ghost up and down on a 100Mb network in under ten minutes and you can clean them whenever you like with minimal fuss.

I hope that lot helps! Good luck!

[theeggmaster]

Have you had a look at g4u
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

[Samson]

You'll need to scandisk, defrag and sysprep prior to imaging.

sysprep?

Ive got an FTP setup with FileZilla Server.

[Geoff]

sysprep?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302577

[Samson]

Theyre Win2k machines... is there a similar procedure?

[ChrisH]

Yes its almost the same you just need the right version of sysprep.

[bensewell]

We use the BartPE disk quite a lot at our work. But its just as easy if the floppy drives are working to make a boot disk then run a mult-cast and pick up all the clients.

[krisd32]

just take the machine off the domain. create a dump sesion in ghost cast server boot off the ghost boot disk you create (from going in to ghost boot wizard you'll ndis2 drivers on the disk for machines your ghosting) once into ghost go to ghost cast enter the session name then select what compression you'd like and away you go. search on the net for ghost casting instructions and they'll give you a more indepth explanation of doing it.

[krisd32]

here's a link to a document explaining everything.

http://home.wlu.edu/~somerville_brow..._ref_guide.pdf

[bensewell]

Using the BARTPE disk will boot most network drivers because it has it built in, it takes a bit more time to boot the machines but definately works. Just make sure that when you make your ghost boot disk you edit the text file on your boot disk to select the new ghost driver name. I've had loads of bad attempts making boot disks that don't boot by not adding the NDIS driver name into the text file.

[craiglay]

Dont forget. the BartPE builder program will allow you to add certain programs, like virus scanners, disk management and imaging tools to help with all kinds of situations.

When I'm in next, i'll try and prepare a guide to BartPE over WDS in RIS legacy so you can network boot BartPE.

Craig