Ghost question....

[QwertyJuan]

Does anyone ever ghost their drives? And if so, how do you do it if the hardware is different in each box?? Is it even possible??

Thanks, QJ

[dbwillis]

I ghost drives all the time.
Ghost usually doesnt have problems with different hardware.

I use a BartPE CD with Ghost
Boot, map drive, ghost an image to the network drive, done/image made
Boot, map drive, pull image from network drive, done/pc reimaged

Different hardware will most likely have a different image, but sometimes 1 image can work across a few different platforms

[QwertyJuan]

Ok what I am wanting to do, would be to make a new image of a machine, with the desired programs installed, then to ghost that image to a bunch of other machines with different hardware. Right now I have 50 machines with identical hardware, and I just take the HDD out of the machine, take it to my cloning computer and 5 minutes later it's back to the way it was when it was new. We are thinking about getting more machines that would have different hardware and was wondering what kind of problems I may run into.

[Demon10000]

Look up the following:

Sysprep: You'll need to use this utility
Duplicate Sids: This is an issue that can arise from imaging PCs. Just be aware of it.

And you will not be able to image machines that have different HALs. That means they'll all need to have the same processor (same family), same number of processors, same power features, etc.

I'd look into RIS, or iron out a nice automated installation with scripted software installs.

[DeaconFrost]

Ghost + BartPE + Sysprep = a great way to manage images for a home or small company. If this is on a large scale, you'll probably want the Ghost Server piece, or something of the like.

[zeplar]

It's easiest if your HALs and drive controllers are same or similar, but not necessary. We have the same image blasted to everything from an 810 to 875, desktops, laptops, servers, IDE, SCSI, AHCI. Sysprep can do some HAL detection if you tell it to, but will occasionally fail because of non-standard implementations. I've found it's easy to swap HAL if your image doesn't boot, but drive controller drivers are a pain to insert after imaging.

So in my case, I find drive controller drivers to be essential. I've forced these into my image with Add Hardware. It'd be easier to copy all the common drivers you might want and have sysprep point to it, otherwise you'll be doing manual driver installs. Under XP, we dump the common drivers for NVIDIA, ATI, Broadcom wired and wireless, SoundMax, Sigmatel, Intel (video, nic, wireless), etc into subfolders.

If you had a lot of different configurations, you might consider looking to Binary Research, the original Ghost folks. They have their Universal Imaging Utility (http://binaryresearch.net/products/the_universal_imaging_utility), though I haven't tried it. It looked like it was just a big repository of drivers.

[QwertyJuan]

Look up the following:

Sysprep: You'll need to use this utility
Duplicate Sids: This is an issue that can arise from imaging PCs. Just be aware of it.

And you will not be able to image machines that have different HALs. That means they'll all need to have the same processor (same family), same number of processors, same power features, etc.

I'd look into RIS, or iron out a nice automated installation with scripted software installs.

I don't join the domain until after the drive has been ghosted, so I've never had a problem with duplicate sids.... I've done this for 3 years, every summer with 50 machines.... no probs, as all the machines have been the same... now they are wanting to replace the machines 10-15 a year, so my life just got real complciated, real fast.... :rolleyes:

[RedShred]

Its not that big of a deal if you get them 10 or so at a time. So what if you have a few images on hand. Set up the first machine of the lot and make an image. When I get a new lot in I try the few images I have and hope for the best...

[Grimmda]

I have over 4,500 PC's in my environment where I work. Of which 3,745 have an image I built loaded on them.

There are 26 different models of hardware. (Of which 6 are laptops)

Some are dual cores, most are single cores some with Hyper Threaded cores.

There are 3 different vendors (HP/Compaq, Dell, Gateway)

Of the 3,745 PC's there are 23 different revisions of the original 1 image I built of XP/SP2 slipstreamed on a P3 700Mhz Gateway E3600 with 512MB RAM.

Anything is possible with 3 years of work and a lot of help here and Google.
:Pats self on back:

I've used BartCD with Ghost 8.0, 8.3, and now 11... And always with my trusty sysprep and the 3 magic lines that makes it all work:
[SysPrep]
BuildMassStorageSection=Yes
[SysprepMassStorage]

:)