What should the structure be like?

[LocoPollo]

Hi, I'm setting up a few machines, but when I have talked to real system admins, they always talk about backups, mirroring, ghosts and stuff like that.

I have started to make two partitions on the PCs, one 4.5 Gb for the system and the programs, and the rest for storage. The idea was that, if the system partition is only 4.5Gb then I can burn a DVD, and if anything should get messed up then I can just roll the image back on that partition again.

But when I think about it 4.5 isn't that much, once the system is on, and the programs are on, and the temp-files, and pagefile is taking its part, then it's actually quite tight. Should I pick ONE partition instead of two?

Can anyone recommend a program to do the restore/ghost trick, so that the systems can be restored easily, just like in internetcafes? And I only know of backing up data on a CD, how do you do it the "right" way??

So, my question is: what is the correct way to set it all up?? The structure and everything.

 

[Grenage]

4.5GB is tight indeed. Also, it may suit your purposes now but in 4 months you will probably be kicking yourself for it. Consider sticking with two partitions but perhaps increase the primary to 10-15GB.

Norton Ghost is a decent program. We used to use it here a long time ago; partition, install, ghost and then burning the primary partition image to CD.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[pmonett]

I have a different disk structure.
I have a system parition that is 4GB, a code partition that is 12GB, and a storage partition that is whatever is left.
The idea is that I do not install applications on the system partition. My system partition is, as much as possible, only for the OS.
All apps are installed on the code partition, all temp directories are set to the storage partition, everything I can map away from the system partition is mapped elsewhere.
It makes for a lot of tinkering, to be sure, but when the PC is correctly set up, I can Ghost the OS without any worry of either useless clutter in the image, nor missing something I need.
Of course, I would dearly like to move the Documents and Settings directory structure to the storage partition, but MS has made that impossible ().

Pascal.

 

[vacunita]

I would go with what pmonett said, and structure it so that the Os partition is at leats 10GB in size the allocate the rest as you wish. When you clone don't image to a CD or DVD, image to a small Hard Drvie.

Here at the office we have three 20GB hard drives. Each with an image for a type of PC, The Dells, the HP's and the Compaq Laptops. We make of point of sticking with the same models of equipment per departmen. SO IT gets Dells. Accounting gets HPs. and Execs get laptops.

So when I need to re image one i just get the proper drive from the cabinet, and image away.

That way it allows you space to have all the basic apps you need installed with the OS, when you want a quick deployment.
Basically the images we keep have the OS. Office. and apps like our telnet client for the IT department, and the Acounting package for the accounting department. and so on. Our avergae image is about 10 to 12 gigs.

Hope this helps.

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[LocoPollo]

Thanks everyone!!

Vacunita >>
If you only got 1 image for each type of computer, then what happends with all the local settings, such as, computername, and so on? Or do you have the computer disconnected from the network until it has its own unique name and so on?
Btw I got 80 Gb harddisks in the computers, so maybe I could place the image on the storage partition.

Grenage >>
If you dont use Ghost anymore, what do you use now?
How can you burn a 10Gb image to a CD? has ghost some kind of compression build in? And can Ghost make an image of the partition that it is installed on, or how does it work?

pmonett >>
I think you can place the "desktop" on the storage partition with "forlderredirector" program:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/folderredirector.htm

thats what I did, I've also placed the pagefile on the D partition on some of the computers. But I still done know if it was smart or not.

Btw does partition magic and norton ghost the same thing?

Thanks again!

 

[pmonett]

Partition Magic allows you to resize/create/delete partitions of all Windows-compatible formats.

Ghost allows you to make a backup of a partition or an entire disk, and copy from said backup at will.

Thus, the two are complementary, but quite different.

Thanks for the link, I'll try it out today.

Pascal.

 

[monsterjta]

I use DriveImage5 for all my imaging needs. It's a nice little DOS program that loads at boot time and very intuitive. I create a directory on my 'data' partition and call it 'images'. When buring an image of my c:\ partition I save it to d:\images\<date>. This way I can restore to a specified date and time, and it's MUCH faster than burning to a DVD or CD because it's transfering the data locally.

Now, for all your data on the d:\ drive, run an NTBACKUP of that and store that on c:\images\<date>. Burn an image of the c:\ drive over to your d:\images\<date> location.

Now you've each drive protected against failures. Of course, you will need 2 physical drives if you want TRUE protection.

Hope This Helps,

Good Luck!

(I do what I can with what I know)

 

[vacunita]

Sorry for the delayed response.

When we reimage a drive, we keep it off the network, while we set it up. The network settings are obtained by DHCP, and the computer name is setup manually before we connect them to the network. Since there are many PC's having an image for each one is less practical than having to change the computer name manually. So we change it manually, not to difficult.

We burn the images to 20gb hard drives, not Cd's or DVD's. Because of the added software, the images wont fit into DVD's. But using small drives has proved the best choice.

For any other local settings, they are recreated after the image is done.

Periodically we update the images, with the patches microsoft releases, the Antivirus , and anything else that might need updatting, and recreate the image into the drives.


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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.