asked on

Norton Ghost 2002 and multiple workstations

I was exposed to Ghosting a number of years back and only knew a little about it at that time. One thing that I remember was that your ghosted image was machine specific, meaning that it would only work to clone machines with the exact same hardware.

I am now in charge of 65 workstations and am looking for the easy solution to rolling out new PCs and also to repairing the ones that go south.

I am planning on using roaming profiles and having users store all data on the network so that if a machines problems are not easily fixable, we can just re-ghost and re-boot.

My question is 2 fold:

1.) How does Norton Ghost deal with different machine types? If I have 10 basic types of hardware for all of my workstations, do I need to have 10 different Ghost images?

2.) If you understand my intention, is this the best way to go about it?

stevenlewis

If I have 10 basic types of hardware for all of my workstations, do I need to have 10 different Ghost images?
Yes, and will still have problems with computer names, tcp/ip settings, etc
You could copy the w98 setup files to a share, share it, and use a network boot disk to connect to it and set up that way
w98 wasn't really desinged for a business network.
w2k has, sysprep & RIS, check into that if you are running w2k servers

kolpy

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...:)

MrBillisMe

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

MrBillisMe

clown s/b clone :)

pleasenospam

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.

GUEEN

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.)

DLockwood

ASKER

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?

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GUEEN

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DLockwood

ASKER

shekerra,

Thanks for the information. I may be back for more when I am ready to start ghosting.

Thanks again - DLockwood