Norton Ghost Corporate

Mmartin_47

Hi all. I work at a hardware depot for a major computer company. Daily we receive 10-15 laptops and we have to go through an evaluation process which includes reimage.

The company provides us with a custom image of Vista or XP. I currently have Norton Ghost 11.5 Corporate and Server 2008.

Question is instead of inserting those DVD's one by one which is a long process, how can I deploy an image in Ghost? I know I need to strip the SID and the computer name, but that's all I know.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

Also looks like people have been having problems imaging a machine due to Ghost not seeing the SATA drive in Ghost: PC-DOS/

Thanks in advance.

NightShade03

The image that you have will need to include sysprep which will strip the sid and such when the computer boots for the first time. The sata drivers would also need to be included with the ghost image that you have. Does the company provide full images already made or are you making them from scratch?

Once you have images made and ready to go...if you have the corporate version of ghost you can use the console to push images without the cd (although if you want to network boot it will also require a pxe server of some sort)

Mmartin_47

Do you know here I can find the ghost console client? I do not see it.

Mmartin_47

NightShade03 wrote: »

The image that you have will need to include sysprep which will strip the sid and such when the computer boots for the first time. The sata drivers would also need to be included with the ghost image that you have. Does the company provide full images already made or are you making them from scratch?

Once you have images made and ready to go...if you have the corporate version of ghost you can use the console to push images without the cd (although if you want to network boot it will also require a pxe server of some sort)

Problem is I try booting from a flash and have ghost running in PC-DOS but it cannot find the hard drive.

hypnotoad

We do something similar -- boot from a modified WinPE or BartPE and run Ghost...It's quicker than booting the CD that comes with Norton. We sometimes have to rebuild our PE discs to include SATA drivers.

You can boot up from PXE or even a flash drive if you desire...that works on most systems.

I've found that imaging from a USB drive is usually quicker than imaging from a network, but that depends on a lot of variables, like the system, the network, the drive, the number of PC's, etc.

edit:
The other trick we use for imaging is to go in to the bios and switch the hard drive mode from RAID or ACHI to IDE (depends on the system). Then it works with more generic drivers.

Mmartin_47

Well I'm getting somewhere. The company I work for didn't upload the correct version of Ghost. Found out you can only get the client if you have Ghost Solution Suite.

Good news is I installed the client on a test machine and the console on the server is able to see it. I've created an image so far so good.

Question is now how do I reimage the rest of the laptops? I was also able to run Sysprep.