Ghost - best method ?

[difinity]

Our Ghost server died last week and all of the images i have made for all of our different machines have been lost. Previously i had an image for each different motherboard and laptop in our college. I never used sysprep as i had no knowledge of it when i started here and we never encountered any problems.

We have the latest version of Ghost installed and i am eager to start making the images again whilst there are no major jobs on. Should i carry on as before and not worry about sysprep, any advice or different ways of doing things will be appreciated, i am happy to try new things.

Thanks

[DMcCoy]

You can use sysprep to have a single image if you wish, I only have 4 images - Staff, Student, Activboard and Smartboard.

With XP you can also leave additional empty folders and add them to the sysprep file. This means you can add drivers to the ghost image directly at a later date if needed (only storage drivers will need to be added before sysprep).

[IrritableTech]

I would do a search on here for sysprep. Its going to make your life a lot easier if you put some time in now reading up, and creating your syspreped image.

We have one image now which works on all machines. My best advise is to create the image on a really old machine with very basic hardware, look into intregrating driver packs and have a look at mysysprep.

[bandgeekmafia78]

When you say your Ghost Server died, do you mean that the Hard Disk with the images on died? Were they not on a 2nd partition or backed up anywhere?

[difinity]

Thanks for your replies so far, i have been reading about sysprep and trying to get my head round it and why it is needed for a while, i like the idea of having fewer images to look after. I will continue to read some more.

@bandgeekmafia78

Seems the images were not backed up, and the RAID on which they were stored became corrupted due to overheating.

[tommccann]

sysprep is very easy to use, just when your ready to create the image run it, enter the U.K setting instead of U.S, enter your XP serial, leave the PC Name blank. Then edit the output system file and change the COMPUTER NAME:"*" to COMPUTER NAME:""

easypeasy!

[benobaggins40]

Hi Difinity,

You may want to look up Mysysprep, You run it along side sysprep, and it will detect which HAL and storage driver the system needs and will apply the drivers, this means that you can have one universal image that will work on about 95% of hardware, from netbooks to those old p3's we've all got gathering dust to dual core + machines.

Also look at driverpacks ( DriverPacks.net) They have compiled large collections of pretty much every driver for every bit of hardware you are ever likely to have installed. Primarily designed for creating slipstreamed install disks, but works great for ghost / WDS images.

It can take a bit of legwork the first time, but boy is it worth it. The best thing to do is build the images on a virtual machine (use the free vmware player, and configure a VM using this handy website EasyVMX!: Virtual Machine Creator), as virtual machines are very generic by nature.

Hope that is of some use to you.

[morganw]

Take a look at this for the standard sysprep pnp driver setup
How to Add OEM Plug and Play Drivers to Windows XP

Gonna check out Mysysprep now though, i'm about to attempt a universal image for 90% of the building.