Hard Drive imaging

[GT98]

At work we have about 100 identical Dell workstations we use. I was talking to my boss today about some projects to keep ourselves busy for the time being. We started talking about drive imaging and how it could save us time, but we had used Ghost when we first got the equipment, but had issues with it and stopped using it.

Basically we are looking for something that will create an image of a hard drive (which would have a fresh win2K install + applications) and copy it to each PC, possibly using Boot-on-LAN function. We would also like something that would like us rename the computer name and set a static IP address while doing this. Any suggestions instead of using Ghost?

[Claymonkey]

For a full desktop management suite you'd want something like altiris. Though it can be a bit pricey.

For a smaller solution I've become a big fan of Acronis. They have a central server version of their product. I'm unsure if it will rename it or set IP for you off the top of my head.

[Dilitante1]

Remote installation server can be run on win2000/2003 server.....

[VJ]

Partimage (on Linux) can save/restore images from harddisk (also over LAN). But setting the IP adresses while doing this is not possible with it.

I use it from a Knoppix boot disk to make images of my windows installation.

I wonder if VMWare might not be an option. They now have a tool called VMWare Converter, which can convert virtual and phycisal PCs. I'm not sure if virtual to physical is an option two (could be only physical to virtual). But if it were to work, you could make a single virtual installation, and then convert this to each of the physical PCs....

Jörg

[Chucky Cheese]

...at work we have a machine with 38 pcs'. on the supervisor pc we run ghost console and each machine has a virtual ghost boot partition, base os images and application images and are unicast to the target pc through the MAC layer of the network. you can group machines and applications easy...very nice

cc

[MultimediaMan]

Ghosting pre-configured machines is not a good idea: You'll get duplicate SIDs. Even changing the SID after the image is laid down has it's own set of drawbacks and limitations. You need to create a sysprepped installation point to do this right.

Personally, I dislike sysprep; it works for what it is, but it is cantakerous, and even if you are religious about keeping your Gold installations clean, your registry is fairly messy, with all kinds of NICs and soundcards listed as phantom devices in it. This is normal for sysprepped machines: you are creating a "one-size-fits-all" Base registry when you create a sysprepped image: each device supported (not necessarily present) will have it's complete registry entries in place.

However, with BartPE in a Network boot set-up (I use WinPE at work), you can install XP and Server 2003 from the PE environment... no CD, no floppies. You just need a DHCP server which supports PXE requests, a tftp server to serve the boot files from, and a share to host the installation files from.

You will need to create an unattended installation setup file by running the setup manager (extracted from Deploy.cab). This is a viable alternative to creating an sysprepped installation point. The only thing you may have to do is name the machines as desired, unless you are happy with random naming Windows Setup assigns; a little scripting work could automate even that: since you have control of the unattend.txt file before setup is actually run on the target machine, it would be possible to alter the unattend.txt file using munge.exe or simply echoing out the unattend.txt file on the individual machines via script to individualize the desired machine name. Joining a domain can also be automated using the regular unattend.txt file.

Just a couple of thoughts.