How many times can you sysprep a machine?

[somabc]

Quick Q -

 

How many times can you sysprep a machine, say you had to build an image but you do not have the original.

 

eg. Build Machine 1 -> sysprep -> Ghost -> Deploy to Machine 2

 

can you then

 

Sysprep Machine 2 -> Ghost -> Deploy to Machine 3

 

I have heard conflicting reports over whether you can sysprep images multiple times, some people say you shouldn't do it, some say its alright.

 

Whats the verdict?

[amfony]

good q. id think that there was no problem with it as the sysprepping action is brininging it back to a unique state.

[powdarrmonkey]

In theory you can sysprep as many times as you like, but I've had it do some really weird things happen after three or four times.

[Michael]

There is no limit as far as I am aware.

[LeMarchand]

How many times can you sysprep a machine, say you had to build an image but you do not have the original.

 

eg. Build Machine 1 -> sysprep -> Ghost -> Deploy to Machine 2

 

can you then

 

Sysprep Machine 2 -> Ghost -> Deploy to Machine 3

 

I've done that without problems.

 

In theory you can sysprep as many times as you like, but I've had it do some really weird things happen after three or four times.

 

I've got at least one Dell that has been sysprepped into double figures with no problems (it's the only one with an optical drive), but have heard that 3+ times can be problematical.

[Teth]

I've done quite a bit of this over the last 3 years and can report both outcomes. The majority work just fine, however I have had machines from as early as second sysprep to as late as the 10th or 11th go tits up. Various interesting errors including complete refusal to be connected to any domain no matter what kind of setting reset attempts I made, blue screens etc.

 

Interestingly a second syspreping of the original machine resulted in a good image on every occasion I can remember. So I would say keep a ghost of the machine pre sysprep and if it goes wrong go back to the ghost and re-sysprep.

[nbauer]

How many machines are you going to need new images on?

[somabc]

It is for a computer lab of around 36 PC's.

 

The lab was imaged in the summer (not by me) and the ghost image was giving an error.

 

I figured it out today, the original image was of 2 partitions, the 2nd unformatted so 20GB of wasted space in the image. If I restore only the 1st partition its fine so I restored it to a PC and then immediately ghosted only the system partition so its now down to 10GB and working.

[nbauer]

Glad you figured it out. If you had closer to 100 pc's in your lab, you would have to check out Universal Imaging Utility-it rocks. But I think they don't license for less than 100 seats. Good Luck.

[FN-GM]

Glad you figured it out. If you had closer to 100 pc's in your lab, you would have to check out Universal Imaging Utility-it rocks. But I think they don't license for less than 100 seats. Good Luck.

 

Why not use ghost?

 

With the ghost console you can start imaging 100 machines in seconds. Then going round to name them wont take long.

[nbauer]

How would you handle different HALs and hardware? Ghost can't do it.

[FN-GM]

How would you handle different HALs and hardware? Ghost can't do it.

 

We have one image that works on 3 different computers. We only have 3 types of computers.

[nbauer]

Then Ghost is just great. When the hardware starts to differ, ghost gets a little tripped up. Sounds like it works perfect for your environment. Cheers.

[FN-GM]

Sorry i don't get you. all ghost does is making the copies of the installation. Windows start to play up on different hardware.

[DMcCoy]

Then Ghost is just great. When the hardware starts to differ, ghost gets a little tripped up. Sounds like it works perfect for your environment. Cheers.

 

The only difficulty when using ghost/sysprep combination is the acpi/non acpi HAL issue. I've got it working on all desktop machines here (laptops need a little work, probably because the old ones I was trying have broken acpi).

 

I just add the drivers to the main sysprep config when we get machines in and re image. If you wanted you can leave empty folders in the sysprep config and copy the files into it with ghost image editor without reghosting the main image!

 

Ghost on it's own can have issues yes, but combined with sysprep then it works in most cases.

[somabc]

Oh we have much more than 36 computers!

 

I looked at the website they have licenses from 25-199 seats at $20.14 per seat. Up to 5000 seats is $10 per seat. Looks quite useful, although we already have a good system of doing unattended builds with various scripts/packages. We only use ghost in the last step to quickly deploy an image to a room of (normally) the same model.

 

Cheers

[Crispin]

Ive run into problems syspreping machines at the 3rd or 4th time aswell.

I remember reading a microsoft article somewhere stating that when using volume licencing while syspreping, this will allow you to sysprep and re-sysprep without any limit. With a single licence i think there is a limit.

Im sure there is a MSNet article somewhere documenting the limits of sysprep.

[Heebeejeebee]

For staight images we've started to use CloneZilla because Ghost has issues with some SATA drives (at least the version we have does). CloneZilla has no such issues and works really well.

 

One day we'll get around to setting up the server parts as well.

 

HBJB