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Hi, I'm the new(and only) ICT Technician at a large primary school. Among a whole load of problems one of the more pressing ones is the 3 laptop trolleys that don't work properly and so I've set up one laptop with all the correct software and info with the idea of creating an image and sending it out to the others to make deployment faster, however it won't Ghost! They are Toshiba Satellite Pro A120 Laptops and I'm using the Symantec Ghost Console to try and create the image. The server can find the laptop I am trying to image, shuts down and appears to go through the motions of setting creating the image but it doesn't boot in to Ghost Console. In the logs I am getting the message "To Virtual Partition" and that's when it's failing. Any ideas or help would be great, I've got a massive amount of work on here as nothing appears to have been updated in years and this is a real headache. Cheers in advance Rich

Just to let all know, NewSID from Sysinternals (Microsoft) is being retired today. While there will be a million mirrors on the internet afterwards, it might still be sensible to grab it today while the newest is on the site. NewSID v4.10 Get it while its there, "just in case" happy sidgenning

I have about 30 machines that i need to install XP Pro on and all the software! Now the problem is we don't have terminal services setup for software installation due to lack of spaces! What is the best way to speed up the process? I was thinking along the lines of installing Windows on one machine and all the software then copying it all and transferring to the other machines? Is this the best way? I have never used a cloning software so would like to have a go at some easy packages that i could use! Thanks

Hi everyone. I've combed all kinds of different forums searching for an answer and have yet to find a similar case so I guess I'll start the precedent here. Pretty much our situation is that we have classrooms that we occasionally have to clone with Ghost 11, the switches in place in each room are really slow so we bought these new Cisco switches (SG200-50) to deploy the image. Pretty much our issue is at least a 15% of the clients fail every single time. They are giving a "client timed out" error, it freezes up the ghostcast and slows down the whole process, and a lot of the time even 50% end up failing when all is said and done. We can usually unicast/locally clone them when they fail, even through the switch with enough tries. It seems pretty random so we can rule out ports pc problems, all the managed switches and un-managed switches seem to have this problem. I've read several articles about tree spanning and Symantec has said that its because we need to enable IGMP (which one of my co-workers argues has nothing to do with multi-casting) and I'm not the most knowledgable with this kind stuff so I'm just playing middleman between my co-worker and Symantec/Cisco technicians. Anyone have any ideas how we can get little to none of the clients to fail?

Hi all - I did go 7 pages deep before posting! Got 16 W7 laptops that the head (understandably) wants out by Xmas. Just got all the software (that will work) loaded and need to tidy up, but have 2 problems. 1) The "old" method of doing this: sysprep/Ghost 8 via UBCD/copy image to network/copy out image seems unlikely to work from what I have read. That gives me 7.5 hours left at that school to find and deploy a solution - and I'd really like to "give out" the "master" machine for testing on Thursday. Has anybody used anything like Clonezilla etc to do this? I guess that FOG might work, but don't have time to set it up/learn it; I really need a quick and easy (preferably boot disc) method. 2) The school has a KMS key, which is no good as there are only 16 machines. How do I get a MAK instead?

All Very new to the "Deploy Studio" software, but it looks really great and will achieve everything that I want. However, I'm having problems getting it to do what I want!!! Regardless which way I try and deploy it I hit problems 1. If I try and deploy using the bootable external drive option. It gives me an error saying that it can't create the drive. even though it's an empty 40GB usb. 2. if I deploy via Netboot, the macbook see's the server, so i tell it to do a network boot and then it fails. This is all very frustrating, and I have twenty macs to clone by the end of next week. Any help would be greatly received. If need be I would be more than willing to pay for a couple of hours work. Regards Ian

Our school acquired 60 donated computers with all the disks wiped clean. I have the reinstall disks too. I've already imaged a bunch of them with clonezilla server. But I also tried a software called RedoBackup.This is a clean , pretty gui on the well known partclone. "Redo Backup and Recovery is so simple that anyone can use it. It is the easiest, most complete disaster recovery solution available. It allows bare-metal restore, which means that even if your hard drive melts or gets completely erased by a virus, you can have a completely-functional system back up and running in as little as 10 minutes. All your documents and settings will be restored to the exact same state they were in when the last snapshot was taken. Redo Backup and Recovery is a live CD, so it does not matter if you use Windows or Linux. You can use the same tool to backup and restore every machine. And because it is open source released under the GPL, it is completely free for personal and commercial use." I tried it an it and it is now the disk I am going to use for imaging single machines to a USB drive or a network share. I also can give this to the rare volunteer who wants to help out around the computer lab. Easy GUI Backup Solution, Bare Metal Restore, Open Source GPL Recovery

Hi all, I'm new to deploying and managing Macs in education. My co-worker (there's two of us supporting a high school) has been working here forever and remembers that there was a program you could load up on a USB drive and it would use an image (captured from a pre-configured MacBook) to re-image another MacBook automatically once the MacBook was booted from the drive. He has tasked me with finding this program/process but I have so far only come up with CCC and SuperDuper! which to my knowledge, can be used to re-image a MacBook from a USB drive but the process is not nearly as automatic nor as quick as my co-worker described. He thought maybe the name for it was something like "Field restore disk" or "One to one restore" or something like that. Searching the Googles has not yielded any favorable results as of yet. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Hey guys, We have a child here at school has really poor eyesight. I need to know what the best solution is to bring the teachers interactive whiteboard / laptop to his desk. I was thinking a tablet would be ideal... Any recommendations / experience of this? Proven solutions? All help appreciated!