Perfered Options with Ghost

[Salesman_Gil]

First, here are my first two threads:
http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthr...894#post890894

http://www.techimo.com/forum/showth...&threadid=87935

My post today has nothing to do about getting it to work though.

My question is this: My plan is to put a slave drive in a machine that will be the "Master Ghoaster" should I:
a) Partition that drive for each model
b) Just save the image on the drive

[Beemer]

b) and just use good naming of the image files.

Cheers!

[John Prophet]

Ok, I think I understand the question and the intent. You are just wanting to find the best way to keep an image ready for the laptops. Out of curiousity, how many different laptops do you have?

Anyway, regardless of that point, what I would do is......

Build one master build of the laptop..all windows updates, strip off all the compaq junk software if there is any, newest drivers etc. In other words, take your time on this one build and get it RIGHT. Then....if the laptop has a cd burner you dont even NEED a master machine of any kind....you just boot off the ghost floppy...and choose "disk to image" and then, from the drop down menu, you pick the cdrw drive. Then it will ask about compression...I usually pick "fast" because sometimes if I pick "high" it causes errors. Then you just ghost the image to the cd. Sometimes it takes me two cd's cuz I put all sort of free game demos and stuff on my builds, but it will probably only take you one cd.

Oh, and what you want to do is, when it asks "put a bootable floppy on the cd?" (or whatever wording it uses)..you choose "yes" and then it prompts you to put the floppy in.....I have a special boot floppy made with a batch file on it that kicks off ghost etc...but I think you can just use the same ghost boot floppy you booted off of. It will copy the floppy to the image and then....viola!....you have a bootable ghost cd-rom with your restore image.

What I would do at that point is take another laptop of the same model...and boot off of the new ghost restore cd and se if it works right. Of course you need to have the laptop bios set to boot off of cd. If it works I would then make a copy or two of the restore cd. I would similarly test each copy to make sure THEY worked.

Then you are all set.


If the laptops dont have cd burners. All you need to do is get a 3.5 to 2.5 ide converter....take the drive out of the laptop, put it in the desktop (I usually just leave em hanging out the side by the IDE cable, lol) and THEN boot off the ghost floppy and go thru the procedure above. Of course you only have to take the hard drive out of the one laptop that one time to make the restore cd.

Im not sure how much trouble the pcmcia thing is but the methods above are very simple.

You just make a restore cd for each model laptop. Then make copies to keep safe etc.

Takes, ohh, 2-5 minutes to restore off of the cd usually.


JP

[Salesman_Gil]

5 diffrent models, but there will be a new one every year.

I wish I could take off the Compaq junk. My hands are tied!
Too many people would have a cow

I like the idea about the CD, but again my hands are tied, they do not like us to take them apart, because they are under warranty.

What I like about the "Master Computer" idea is, I can put my new Inventory program on it. We have 300 computers to keep track of, and the person now uses a paper system, and of course she loses some, and some people are accused of haveing three. What a joke!

This way I could have it all together, and the TCP/IP, will allow me to do the weekly updates I'm planning. We have special software, that has updates weekly, not to mention Nortons, Windows, drivers etc.

[Target]

I'm with Beemer... single drive reserved for holding your Ghost images, and good naming conventions.

Also have a question for you:
What Operating System are you running on these machines? (ie: what OS is going to be ghosted to them)

[John Prophet]

Well you can still do the cd thing...you just ghost to the master machine second hard drive using your pcmica setup. THEN make the cd's. The good thing about restore cd's is that

a) they arent lost due to lightning strikes or power fluctuations.
b) they require no setup once they are made, no cables to attach
c) you can have as many as you like, no limitations for size or partitions as you would face trying to store several images on a drive.
d) more flexible....you could have 50 restore cd's in 50 locations of you like, or you can restore 5 computers at the same time, unlike as with a master restore machine which does 1 at a time.

[Salesman_Gil]

Right now I have 4 with 98se, and 1 with XP pro.

I'm not sure, how the ghosting to another computer, then to a CD-R would work.
Would you Ghost the image then burn it, or can you Ghost right to the CD-R?

[John Prophet]

Well, if the laptop had a cd burner you would just do all the ghosting right there.

But if not...I would do this. Take a spare second hard drive. Open up a desktop machine that has a cd burner. Unhook the IDE cable off of the hard drive in the comp....hook up the spare hard drive where you unhooked the main one....I usually just leave it hanging there, lol.

Boot off of your ghost floppy and ghost from the laptop to the spare drive on the desktop machine using "disk to disk". Then unhook the laptop.....with the spare drive still in the desktop...boot off the ghost floppy on the desktop and do "disk to image" and select the cdrw and also say "yes" when it asks about the boot floppy.

After the restore cd is made...unhook the spare drive and put the main one back on. The desktop will never know the difference, lol.

One important thing..DONT..repeat ..DONT boot off of the spare hard drive while its in the desktop...you are ONLY booting off of the GHOST FLOPPY..so make sure floppy is first in the boot order.

I am always nervous also about having two hard drives with different OS's on them on the same machine..unless I am purposely trying to dual boot.

My method may seem like a lot of swapping around etc..but you only have to do it once!! or once per laptop model.

The reason for unhooking the first drive is first of all for simplicity...you dont have to fool with jumpers etc etc....secondly...you ELIMINATE the sad possibility of accidently ghosting over the wrong drive. I speak from experience, lol.

Also I am sure you already know that when you ghost you dont have to format or partition first.

We used to keep stacks of small hard drives laying around our shop with ghost mages on them,lol..before we learned how to make the restore disks.

[Bovon]

Beemer & John Prophet... I don't want to hijack this thread, and I don't particularly want to start a thread for a few simple ghost questions. Would it annoy either of you if I PM you with a few questions concerning the how-toos with ghosting?

Tnx

[Salesman_Gil]

Hey feel free to hijack, I wouldn't mind