Ghosting multiple PCs or single PC

[rpearson]

Were can I find accurate how-to info on ghosting machines? I know there are several avenues that can be takin on this , your suggestions are welcome as well. What tools do the veterans use? tHANKS IN ADVANCE.

 

[paulrw1]

Try buying Norton's Ghost. It comes with a lengthy manual.

 

[paulrw1]

OOPS! I should also mention that IF you are going to ghost multiple pc's they should be about 99.99% identical to each other. This means that the cpu's should be the same type and speed, the hard drives about the same size, the BIOS at least from the same manufacturer.
WHY? If your componets are different from pc to pc, then you will NOT be able to ghost each machine. There is supposed to be a way around this, but I haven't seen it work very well. Maybe somone eklse has, but I have not. Good luck!

 

[wolluf]

Would partly agree with paulrw1 - just add its the motherboard (rather than the bios) that matters most (if mobos the same, but have different peripherals, the cloning should work, but you may have some 'tidying up' to do.
Cpu speeds & hard drive sizes are just about irrelevant (assuming the image will fit on the target drive and the cpu will run the o/s)

Also you should use sysprep before you clone (its on the XP install CD with help - latest version on MS website) - so each new installation is set up correctly and isn't just a copy of the image - eg, SIDs in a domain, and if you're not using a coroporate version of XP, so you can put the correct 25 character key in).

Btw - if the hardware is different, generally a repair reinstall -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341

will fix it (but takes same time as in install - so not much use unless your software setup & config takes a long time).

PS. I've assumed XP as the o/s - but most comments apply generally.

 

[paulrw1]

It's been my experience that different bios/mb/etc make a BIG difference in ghosting. I attempted to clone 8 pc's w/o any luck due to the fact they were all just different enough that ghost didn't want to work.

 

[wolluf]

paul - if mobo is same, bios very likely is too. Its the drivers for the mobo that cause the biggest problems (ie, cloned system won't boot). Although other periperals can occasionally cause non-booting too - its not as common (though, something like different hard drive types - eg IDE, SCSI, SATA would almost certainly cause non-booting). For most different peripherals you may need to install a driver yourself after booting the cloned system.

 

[ksdadguy]

Are there any docs that explain network overhead. We used to be able to ghost 4 machines at a time and now can only do one. The big difference in our network is that we added a couple of Dell switches. Is it something in the Dell setup that is throttling down bandwidth.

No access to internet while this one ghost is being performed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[micker377]

Dell switches = different hardware. As noted before, computers, hardware, and software must match.

 

[DTSMAN]

Since we have a large selection of pcs, we run partition magic on them and set a 5 gig or so partition at the end of the drive and hide it. We image each pc to that partition and when we need to reload, we boot from the image boot disk and reimage to the bootable part of the drive from the part with the image. That way the right image is always easily available and we also store the images on another machine in house.

Bo

Kentucky phone support-
"Mash the Kentrol key and hit scape."

 

[micker377]

Bospruell:
Great idea, unless the reason for re-installing is to replace the hard drive that the image is on!