How to use

Here is a guide, but he should really provide you with more information than that.

http://ghost.radified.com/

(16 pages, table of contents at bottom of first page)

Thanks. I will look it over. Yeah, I know. I think he might be a prick.

LOL. Good luck man.

I have to leave but will be back in the am. I will post then. Thanks again.

Ya this isn't a lot of information to go on. We don't know what version of ghost and or what tools you have at your disposal to accomplish this goal.

In my experience IT departments use "Ghost 2003" with "Ghost32.exe" as the main program. Since you have to boot the computer off of a floppy or CD to over-write the C: drive you will should have one of those two things. Usually it's a "Pre-installation Environment" a.k.a. a PE CD that is used and will contain this Ghost32.exe.

If that were the case you would boot the PE CD, bring up ghost32 and try to browse to the server share that holds the Ghost image.

Something like "disk"->"from image" and browse to the .GHO file. It will warn you that all the data will be lost. Acknowledge this and it will start ghosting over the network.

Of course above is pretty much entirely hypothetical, I could be way off. Maybe they use ghost casting. Maybe you slave the HDD in the new machines to a master ghost machine. The above might give you some ideas though...

It is ghost32 that they are using. There are two current iamges on the server that I can see. Do I make a disk using the ghost32.exe and boot from it on the new pc?

M

They should already have a PE disc made some place with Ghost32 on it already along with support for the the NIC in the Dells already setup to go. They should anyway.

There's a windows application associated with ghost. That would walk you through making a DOS floppy.  There's a little wizard to walk you through it. You could use the image (like .img file) of the floppy to make a bootable DOS CD with the 16-bit Ghost. Unless you add NIC support in DOS (no a trivial task in my experience) that wouldn't help to get the images that are only stored on a server.

Ghost.exe == 16-bit Ghost for DOS
Ghost32.exe == 32-bit Ghost for Windows and WinPE

I would say ask around if there is a corporate Win-P-E disc w/Ghost32 on it. Or if they made a special floppy for the purpose of ghosting machines from the server.

Here are some informational sites:
http://www.windowspe.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment

There are still a lot of variables I don't know (and you probably shouldn't publish for all to see anyway) so it is difficult to give you a definitive answer. Like do you have access to the "server"? Is the server just another PC that stores images or an actual active directory server 2003 type thing? Are there any co-workers you can ask about a PE disk real quick?

There's a 99.9999% chance it has to be a PE disk with Ghost32.exe they are using to image the machines. Although I can't think of anything else so I don't know why it wouldn't be 100%. I suppose they could boot a PE environment from a thumb drive or USB hard drive or something. That would be weird and inefficient so I doubt it.

Thanks