I'd recommend Ghost too.
I use it in an environment of ~150 machines in a school. It makes life so much easier on me when kids do something to one of the machines.
I can simply call up a Multicast session using PXE booting and schedule the machine to reimage off the Multicast server.
quote:
Originally posted by YourNeibour
My question is. How would I do that using ghost 10.0 or is it just faster and better to reinstall everything manually like windows, office etc....?
First of all, it is way faster. Configure once, deploy multiple times.
Install all of your software - get it all configured properly.
After that is done, I'd recommend using Microsoft's SysPrep (From System Deployment Kit - Microsoft Website or your Windows CD). Make sure you get the correct version for your version of Windows.
Sysprep is a small utility which will remove any hardware specific information from the machine including its SID (Unique system idenifier). This will also mean that if you change your hardware in the future, there is a greater (95%) chance that the old image will work with the new hardware.
Ghost the machine to create the image - using a Ghot bootdisk (Can provide instructions for creating a CD if needed). You can either ghost onto a CD/DVD, USB HDD, Local Disk (not the one being used for the image), Network, or Multicast server.
Boot into the machine again - Windows will run the "mini setup" which is a short setup that allows you to configure your machine (If you have a branded machine you'll likely have seen this before when you first turn it on).
It'll take a few minutes then you'll be on your way again.
Ghost is popular, very popular. Toshina use Symantec Ghost (Norton is the "family" brand, whereas Symantec is the "corporate" brand) to provide the restore functionality of all of their machines.
Another application to check out which is similar and seems to be gaining market popularit is
Acronis True Image - infact, the Dept. of Education here now recommend this over Ghost (I still prefer Ghost).
Regards,
Chris
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