Automated Full System Ghost

[Zugdud]

Howdy folks, is anyone here running an automated schedualed norton ghost? I'd like to do this to keep system images up to date as doing this manually is very time consuming and usually means it doesn't get done...

Seems like the best way i can come up with is using a hot-swap hard drive that will recieve the image, schedualing a system reboot once a week, inserting a norton boot disk at the end of the week with the proper command arguments to automatically perform a ghost when booted from. The problems i have with this is that id have to insert the boot floppy every friday (assuming the ghost is schedualed for sunday) and the system would require a manual reboot on monday sense it would be stuck in the ghost screen.

Anyone have any ideas for improving this? If the system could bring itself up after ghosting and not require the boot floppy it would make things much easier

Using Windows 2000 Server and Norton Ghost Enterprise 9

 

[GlenJohnson]

Why are you ghosting and not using a backup? Norton Ghost was never meant as a replacement of backups.

Glen A. Johnson
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[Zugdud]

I'm doing nightly data backups, the norton ghost image is just to restore the operating system

 

[TravisM]

I woudl suggest using RIS instead, or at least PXE for booting. You could have the PC set to boot from PXE to start with, but shut down the back end of the service during the week, then when you want it to ghost the machines, just turn bootp and the PXE params on, the machine will reboot, launch from PXE and do an unattended/RIS install of your choice (or run ghost if you really want, but then you'll be adding the machine back into the domain by hand, switching SIDS, etc) and call it a day. Or leave PXE on all the time, remove from the boot options and just have someone push f12 at bootup to start the process.