xp rollout

[ptrainor1]

problem: got to upgrade 100 NT 4 stations ( 4 rooms of identical hardware ) to XP pro......... however most of the stations have broken cd drives and/or floppy drives and non pxe network cards. Have ghost and drive centre deploy.

ANY IDEAS ON HOW TO APPROACH THIS?

[john]

You could do it like i used to, make 1 machine your perfect build, then run sysprep on it, so its shut down then use a Ghost boot disk (so that 1 machine needs a good floppy or CD drive) and then use disk2disk clone from the ghost book disk, and insert your hard drives one at a time and away you go, it will take a day or two to get through all your drives, but you can give the machines the upgrades they need, a vac out etc whilst they are cloning, and you can even set more than one machine up to be imaging at once, so you could get 5 or more going at once and be through it quickly. When you start them up, the sysprep process runs so they get new SIDs and will give you the option to rename and join the domain so that will work, but take take

[beeswax]

which version of ghost do you have?

[ptrainor1]

ghost 9 - i think i am at home now...

[Ric_]

if you have suitable nics (mainly 3com) you can make a boot disk for RIS... you will need a usb floppy drive or something though.

[ChrisH]

Their a real pain workstations like that I always had to open them up to reinstall. I just got rid of the last 30 last week thank god and have pxe enabled PCs in all the suites now.

[Norphy]

You could do it like i used to, make 1 machine your perfect build, then run sysprep on it, so its shut down then use a Ghost boot disk (so that 1 machine needs a good floppy or CD drive) and then use disk2disk clone from the ghost book disk, and insert your hard drives one at a time and away you go, it will take a day or two to get through all your drives, but you can give the machines the upgrades they need, a vac out etc whilst they are cloning, and you can even set more than one machine up to be imaging at once, so you could get 5 or more going at once and be through it quickly. When you start them up, the sysprep process runs so they get new SIDs and will give you the option to rename and join the domain so that will work, but take take

Seriously, get rid of Norton Ghost and get Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition. Ghost Corp Ed can prevent you from having to bugger about like that. You get something called the Ghost Console. The Console can push down clients to each of the workstations. Once you create install an OS and install the software on a PC, you can tell the Ghost Console to take a snapshop of it on the Ghost Server. You then tell the Ghost console to push the image to the rest of the workstations. Theres a utility called Ghostwalker which will change the SID for you and the Ghost console will also rejoin the PC to your domain for you. It would take a couple of hours for you to create the image for the PCs and less than half an hour to pull the image from it and another half hour to push it down to the rest of the workstations.

[john]

I tried it , but prefer RIS now I use that. I have an old copy of Ghost Walker of floppy disk from when it was on its own years ago. Worked well, but if you can, go RIS. As Ric has said, you may be able to get RIS to work with your NICs, I have used it with a lot of my old ones - Allied Telesyn ones, so who knows you may be lucky.

[ptrainor1]

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR REPLIES

These are DELL OPTIPLex 150 stations purchased in 2001. No money to replace broken parts or buy additional software. I will use the advice given to work out a plan to do this.

[john]

You may find that using RIS, which is free with Server 2000 and 2003, and using a RIS boot disk will work with them as they will have big name network cards in which may well support booting from them, so you may be in luck.

[ptrainor1]

Thank you John ( and others) never did a RIS imaging exercise but got some notes on it.. will try to work it out over the next few days.

[ChrisH]

Theres a big ris post in the howto section that should help you out.

[ptrainor1]

Thank you all for your help. Problem has now been resolved.

[fooby]

Even though it is fixed, Have you thought about making these computers thin clients? Are they up to spec to run XP well?

fooby

[ptrainor1]

yes they are reasonably high spec - and run xp ok. do not want to go down the thin client route