Network Ghosting

L

Lugztaz

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
1,783
I will be ghosting 10+ Dell Laptops for resale and I'm looking for the best way to get this done. I want to make sure the erase is mostly secure, I dont need to be writing zeros or anything.

I will setup one laptop with drivers, windows updates and any programs that will be going along with the laptops so I want to incorporate that.

What are some suggestions?
 
Get your one laptop the way you want it, sysprep it, make an image of it and ghost it to the rest. Good luck if your doing vista.
 
What Zlash said. I used to work at the University of Tampa, and I was in control of all of hte public labs. We'd make an image, sysprep it, and load it onto a laptop. Then, I had to bring a big switch, and hook it up to each desktop in a lab, and feed the image from the laptop to the desktops.

Why, you ask?

Because they higher ups thought pushing an image over the network would grind it to a halt. Sometimes I did it behind their backs, and it worked fine, but your mileage may vary....
 
I've never used sysprep but I've heard of it. What ghosting program should I use to push to these clients? Anything nice and quick from experience?
 
Um...the answer to your question ""What ghosting program should I use to push to these clients"

is from your initial post "I will be ghosting 10+ Dell Laptops for resale"

a-do you have a copy of ghost?
b-do you have an XP CD?
c-you can look into making a BartPE CD with DriveImageXML (both are free) to make your process easier
You can also make the bartPE CD initially, then make an image of one laptop, then remake the BartPE and include the image but this time put it all on a DVD.
just pop in the DVD into the laptop, boot up, take the image off the DVD and put it onto the HDD, no networking needed
 
We use Symantec Ghost at work. We have to do the Ghosting at the physical station though for the most part. When we try use the remote console and do it from our IT workstations, most of the time it ends up failing. We dont know what causes this, if its our end or something wrong with Ghost. If we are pushing a big image, we will do it from the remote console and then go to the fail stations, but most of the times its just a staff member with a mess up config and its just easier ghosting them a new image then trying to figure out whats wrong with there computer.
 
Same here, Ghost. What you want to do is called Ghost Casting, in which my college TimBowens mentioned. At my old job I started into learning this function with our laptops. I didn't get a chance to fully set it out as the nonprofit lost funding and IT was the first dept to do budget cuts. Nerveless I have done it a few times and its pretty simple.
 
i used to use ghost but now i use wds which is amazing

way better for imaging windows stuff plus its free

or if you want something open source that supports everything try clonezilla which is fast as hell
 
GhostCast server is fine. One of the nice thing is being able to tell it to automatically start sending once a certain number of clients join, and the ability to have it re-start the session once it's done (So you don't have to visit the server console multiple times to start a new session if you are pushing out the same image). With the newer version of Ghost Suite, making Windows PE bootdisks is incredibly effortless and painless, even when you want to inject drivers for any NIC/storage device (Be sure to exclude iastor though (storage), for some reason that's a 64-bit driver and it was included in the 32-bit section).

Sysprep is fun. It's also very powerful, and picky -- be sure to get all your drivers in and make it as automated as possible. Go over your sysprep.inf several times with a fine comb.This will help you save some time with specifying driver directories for your various laptop models.

One other tip -- when preparing your image, make backups!! First image, when you're done setting it up and when you're ready to run Sysprep. Second image, after you run Sysprep and the PC shut down. I usually call these Pre-sysprep and sysprep, respectively.

Although Ghost Suite 2.5 has PXE booting capabilities, I find it quirky and use WDS for that instead. Once you sysprep your image, you can easily upload it to a WDS server using wdscapture. Be sure to get the HALs right; for example, Dell laptops of the Dx10 model and newer all use ACPI Uni/Multiprocessor. Anything Dx00 or older only use the ACPI PC HAL,

Sorry if this was too much info right at ya, just had a lot in my head and this is what I now do for a living :)

PS: If you were interested in multicasting with Ghost (which does save a lot of time), it's usually best to keep that on its own network (isolated switch)... I was able to successfully take down a few core routers and the VoIP system on our corporate network when starting a ghostcast multicasting session. This might not happen everywhere, but just a heads up.
 
For ghosting you might also wanna look at Clonezilla. Its open source, can do multicasting, has a PXE server edition.
 
RavenD said:
For ghosting you might also wanna look at Clonezilla. Its open source, can do multicasting, has a PXE server edition.
Click to expand...

Looks interesting, but how user friendly is it? I wasn't overly impressed with the documentation (then again, most open source software lack that, let alone many product you pay for), but I may have just missed something.
 
Blitzrommel said:
Looks interesting, but how user friendly is it? I wasn't overly impressed with the documentation (then again, most open source software lack that, let alone many product you pay for), but I may have just missed something.
Click to expand...

I havent actually used the server version, but the basic bootable norton ghost equivalent is quite straightforward to use, and works well. The server version boots into XFCE; seems fairly straightforward to use, but i havent had an environment to go through the whole process in, and I dont have time to test it on a virtual network right now.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top