How can I make bootable ghost (image) CD’s

[chrisreed]

Hi. I work in a school where we occasionally need to clone an XP hard disk to lots of new machines, or to machines where the students have (some how) managed to mess it up.

To make the process faster I want to have the ghost image compressed on several bootable CD's to speed the process up. Does anyone know a software that I can use to make the bootable ghost (image) CD’s?

OR

But I have tried a software called Symantec Norton Ghost 10.0 this software backups the entire drive with a .v2i file extension and this file extension is not a bootable file. Does anyone know how I can convert this file and make it in to a bootable file?

I tried google but i did not get any luck!

Thanx

Chris Reeds (needs your help please)

[somabc]

Normally you want to PXE boot (via the network) your new machines and multicast the image to all computers simultaneously. This is by far the fastest and easiest method once you have configured the appropriate servers.

If you do not want to use the network at all (for whatever reason) you could add the Ghost software to a BartPE CD, boot from that and use an image stored on an external hard drive.

Booting each PC individually by CD and loading the image from multiple CDs seems like a very slow time consuming route to rolling out your images.

[chrisreed]

Normally you want to PXE boot (via the network) your new machines and multicast the image to all computers simultaneously. This is by far the fastest and easiest method once you have configured the appropriate servers.

If you do not want to use the network at all (for whatever reason) you could add the Ghost software to a BartPE CD, boot from that and use an image stored on an external hard drive.

Booting each PC individually by CD and loading the image from multiple CDs seems like a very slow time consuming route to rolling out your images.

Thank You, i just had a look at BartPE it looks like a useful tool.

[Michael]

I use Image for Windows which can work with BartPE. I then boot from the CD, connect to the server share or external hard disk and wait till the imaging finishes. After a reboot, Sysprep starts and the machine is then joined to the domain.

The only tricky bit is getting the right network card drivers (if Windows doesn't have any built in drivers), but other than this, it's straight forward and it works.

[somabc]

UBCD for windows is a very useful BartPE based CD filled with free software.

UBCD for Windows