Dr Hu

I'm having a big push this year to replace a lot of ancient PC's in my company - now were not talking thousands here, but over the course of the year I will prob be looking at 100+

Now - I've used Ghost in the past, doing HDD to HDD NT clones, but this involved opening cases, IDE cables etc - there must be a better way.

Now in my few Microsoft courses I've done I know there are lots of ways of automating installs - ie RIS, Unattend.txt, SysDiff, UDF etc etc - but all the PC's we buy are OEM pre-installed IBM's with XP Pro already on but just need exploding up, can I use a difference file/answer file at this point? - I dont think I can - it seems mad to have to do a complete OS re-install when its already there - Mainly all I want to do is give a Machine name, user name, domain name, regional etc, PLUS install basic tools like Office2000, winzip, acrobat & Notes.

What's the best way to do it? - I dont mind setting up a master server/RIS server if this is what it takes....

I have looked at Enterprise Ghost etc, but this seems to be a PXE boot install - again all the PC's are alredy pre-installed....

Anybody used Ghost like this - or got a better way?

lastly they are not all going to be done together - I can't get the management to buy the PC's en-masse - but it will be a drip feed throughout the year.

Thanks for any advice.

AllanB

Drop me a line tomorrow at allan.bayman@eu.mwhse.com and I can see what we can do and get you talking to one of our tech guys who can give you an idea of some of the options open to you.


AllanB

snowcrash

you can do it using Ghost Enterprise and the Ghost console that comes with it (although this will require the installation of Ghost Client onto the machines that are out there)..

Or why don't you just Ghost all the machines with a new image over your network (doing a broadcast download via TCP/IP) then you only need to go around and boot them up with a ghost bootdisk.. (instead of moving Hard disks about?)

darlodge

We did a small rollout earlier in the year (25 Win 2000 machines) and ended up taking a standard Dell build and formatting it and building it from scratch. We then ghosted the disk and Sys Prepped each machine (so that Windows serial numbers, machine name etc.) so they are unique.

We have to do another 150 - 175 this year and they will be done in exactly the same way.

Regards
Darren

darlodge

Oh and we stuck the Ghost image file on a CD (you might have to use a DVD depending on image size) and made it bootable. Then turn the machines on, insert the cd and 15-20 minutes later all you have to do is enter a unique computer name and the Windows serial number. 1 machine built in under 30 minutes. Simple

Darren

iDLe*

As above from Darren - we did our laptops in much the same way. Can recover anyones machine with re-image in 8 minutes, copy data back and profile, all done in 30 mins.

Make sure you can get all the same spec machines, ie check the obsolescence listing as Windows 2000/XP ghosting is hardware specific, may cause some problems so be aware.

Because your not doing it in one hit I'd suggest building a bullet proof install on the first machine, take an image to the network or disk and then apply this to the next and so on. Take you 10 minutes per machine to change the comp name and join the domain but will probably be easiest.

dsmith

Done this in the past with a Network boot disk accessing a ghost image and then renaming PC - but that was on 95 or 98. Howvever the stuff to do it is well documented for 2K / XP.

Take plenty of time with your "master build" and make sure it has *everything* the way you want it.

As said above the key to minimum effort here is ensuring all the PCs come with the same build- disk size/network card/video card etc.

Deano