Network inquiry

How does "imaging" work on a network. I read someplace that if you have a network, you can create images for PCs on the server in case you want to re-format and restore a PC and it will save you time and hassle.

Does it work on any NOS.?? Do you need any special software for it???

I appreciate any input and thank you very much in advance.

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Ten9t6

The imaging software that I use daily is Symantec Ghost. We have about 50 computers in our hands on lab at the school. All of the computers have the exact same hardware. This is important when using one image for multiple computers. How it works is like this....

I load all the software that I need on one computer. Then, if it is a windows image, I run sysprep on the image. Then I use ghost to make a copy of the hard drive and save the image on a multicast server. Once the image is saved to the server, I can load it on all the other computers. I then boot all the other computers to a floppy disck that I made with the ghost application. This allows me to connect to the server and pull the image down to all the other computers in the lab.

This can also be used for fast recovery in other environments where the hardware is the same. If a hard drive crashes....and I have an image (or snapshot of the original image that is on all the pcs, I can quickly copy the image to a new hard drive. This would allow me to get a crashed computer up and running in the network in under 30 minutes. This is much faster than reinstalling all the applications.

Hope this helps some...

oh yeah..or other question...I have ghosted images of 98, ME, NT, XP, 2000, 2003...and several versions of Linux...I have had problems with some versions of Linux.....It had to do with the file formats..I had to move the boot loader and use ext3 instead of ext2....but I think this corrected with newer versions of Ghost.

canaan

Thank you for your valuable input. But I have few questions.
We have 25-28 PCs. But these PCs vary in hardware and the applications they use.(few may be similar)

- Do I have to create an image for each PC. Is it still worth it in this case.??
- If you format a PC and boot off a floppy how can you connect to the server to retrieve the image. ?(can you save the image on the CD for example)

Thanks

sab4you

canaan wrote:

Thank you for your valuable input. But I have few questions.
We have 25-28 PCs. But these PCs vary in hardware and the applications they use.(few may be similar)

- Do I have to create an image for each PC. Is it still worth it in this case.??
- If you format a PC and boot off a floppy how can you connect to the server to retrieve the image. ?(can you save the image on the CD for example)

Thanks

If the computers use different hardware and applications then I wouldnt suggest the use of an image.

I would investigate putting the Windows CD on the network and having your computers boot to network to install. You can create scripts for this installation to make it unattended. This would create custom floppies to use on each type of setup to help configure your differences. This should take care of most of the dirty work and I think you can also have it install applications as well.

I reviewed this in the past, but unfortunately am vauge since I have never used it myself and dont know the exact details. I think if you spent some time learning about unattended installations you could figure it out and get it to work for you.