Norton Ghost 2002 and multiple workstations

Hi,
I am not an expert in this area and my comment doesn't exactly relate to your question, but this may help you out in your administration of the pc's.  The company I work for has some 200 pcs/laptops of many varying makes/models using Novell for our LAN.  Our IT people use a program called Zenworks for updating the pcs/laptops and application distribution/updates.  Base PC images/profiles/user data/etc(everything)are stored on a server.  Once a new PC is set up with basic networking capability, ZENworks is used to load and setup the PC with the operating system/applications/etc.
If by chance you use Novell, check this link out

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/desktops/preboot/quicklook.html

To show the power of this program, IT are about to embark on a major rollout of XP using ZENworks across the LAN.

I almost sound like a sales rep for this product...:)

To add to StevenLewis's comment, the GHOST image is machine specific but you get the oportunity to set hard drive parameters. If the set ups are just variations in peripherals like printers, zips and such you would manually add these items but cloning between machines of different manufacture or processor speed does not work. We have a series of machines running 100, 133, 266, 450MHZ, etc and each has their own clown configuration on the Z\:drive. We observed the various stations and clowned a known stable unit as the base. When updates are made the new configuration is stored as a new file until it's stability is established before clearing the original from the server.


WLH

clown s/b clone :)

If you plan to have 65 different user profiles on one machine so that a user
could use any machine, FORGET IT, at least under Windows 98.  I don't think there
is a theoretical limit, but in practice more than one will create headaches that would
increase exponentially.

I used to work at a University out west and I had 22 computer labs to ghost (using V 5D)  When I first started the job - what a mess - endless computer hardware woes.  So what I did at first was make a base OS image (cleaned up, updates, all drivers from device magr. deleted) so that when I went to create this endless stream of images - at least I had a base OS to ghost down from the server.
By the time I left my position there - they had made many hardware changes and most labs (large ones) only needed 2-4 images. In that capacity I set up multicasting (which is a breeze) when it comes to getting 50 or more computers reimaged (using switches.)
So the hardware is the most pivotol piece of this puzzle.  The more you streamline the hardware - the easier it is to work with Ghost.
In answer to your question:
1. If you have 10 different hardware configs. - for now make a base image via the method above - yes you will need 10 different images after that - but you can make boot floppies with menus to select an image from.
2. It is the only option you have at the moment. Unless you can get them to streamline the hardware and upgrade to an enterprise version of Ghost (2002 will not multicast) - then you will end up having to work w/ ghost as suggested above. (Steve Mrbill) > so by removing all the drivers from device manager prior to uploading - you will get a clean image and will have to add drivers to each of the other 9 images (so if you used this method you would have 11 images.)

Hey Shekerra,

Sounds like you have a little bit of experience with this!

What pieces of hardware determine whether you need a separate image? In other words, if I have 2 PCs that are 133mhz, but they have different motherboards and different Hard Drives, will I need a different ghost image for both?