Hello together,
I am as new here in the forum as doing the Ghost Twist

I started working in a new company some month ago and there the old IT admin setup a system to restore the student pcs (which have to be restored every week on friday). What is done, is starting a pc with ghostsrv.exe - choosing the image for the laptops on the switch from en external harddrive. then booting all clients with a CD and choose ghostcast.

nevertheless, I wanna have a way were the images for the laptop is stored on a second partition directly on the laptop, starting the laptop and choosing a option in the boot menu or pressing a button on boot up should reimage the laptop.

I read about this possibility in

http://911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14127&pid=111856

for another version of ghost.
is this still possible, what I have to do - this option would save me an enormous amount of time, cause network is slow, more different laptop types means different images on one network and harddrive and that takes time til finishing.

thanks for the help

Rad wrote on Apr 21^st, 2008 at 10:13pm:

They don't, never have, and never will.

Presumably, he has some earlier version of GSS (or perhaps even older under its previous name, Ghost Enterprise - we still get v7.5 customers turning up from time to time).

Actually now in GSS2.5 now that we've been released from some of the artificial political limitations forced on us, GSS2.5 will actually be able to GhostCast V2i images (although really, being able to GhostCast VMDKs is a vastly bigger win for customers - lots of overlap between GSS and VMware customers, much less between the GSS and BESR customer bases).

To deal with the adaptation process between the two radically different formats, what GSS2.5 GhostCast actually does in this case is run its own copy of Ghost32 to do a disk->image clone into a named pipe, and that dynamically-created .GHO is what gets streamed out to the Ghost clients.

To make this (that is, the original question about a key-press driven) process work with GSS2.5 I just have to write up a proper guide for SrFixMBR (I know I never completely answered the questions about it in the other forum, but that's because I never actually worked on the thing - our support folks evidently read Radified because they found that thread and asked me to write a guide for them, which I'll try to get around to as soon as GSS2.5 is completely off my plate).

ok, to clearify something - I dont know whicht vesion of the solution is running here in the office since years - but I will get rid of it.

so I had a look at the symantec homepage and found that the newest version is ghost 14 - thats the reason of my title.
what I want is:

we are having about 30 laptops of 3 types which have to get reimaged every friday after the courses we held.
my plan would be, making a extra partition holding the ghost image, starting the laptop pressing a key and waiting til everything is finished.

no networking, cause of the traffic problems and the boot time which takes long and makes problems half a time.

so how can I realise this specific problem, I can also use another version of ghost - doesn't matter if I can get it from somewhere.

and yes I know wien - I am working there at the moment

herbert wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2008 at 1:26am:

herbert wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2008 at 1:29am:

That's not good news, unfortunately, since neither of those come with GhostSrv.exe either - those are both, like "Norton Ghost 14", strictly single-user products licensed for use with one and only one PC.

That means that there's a real possibility that the GhostSrv.exe you're using doesn't come from a legal copy of one of the corporate versions, and your predecessor might have left not just you but your employer a potentially very expensive illegal mess. Getting rid of that mess and replacing it is good, but if your predecessor was disposed towards pirating software it may well be worth carrying out a very thorough audit of your whole setup - the way these things work is that where there's one case it's usually not isolated.

Probably the best thing for you to do is to look up the precise version number of GhostSrv.exe, from either or both of the "Help" "About" dialog or the "Version" tab of the GhostSrv.exe file properties. If you PM me on the boards with that information I'll be able to match that up with our records - since I'm just a regular user here like you I have no way of determining your e-mail or identifying you. The point of the exercise is that if there turns out to be clear evidence that your predecessor acted illegally (and thus exposed your employer to some potentially eyewatering liabilities) then you need to present that to your manager so you can judge what other things you might need to look into to verify that your environment is A-OK.

Not that there's any need to panic, you're clearly aiming to do the right thing to sort things out, it's just that this kind of situation is potentially quite sticky and you need to know if it's one where you need to start creating a paper trail to ensure both that you personally don't end up on a hook and that your employer is fully aware of what might have gone on unbeknownst to them.

Quote:

Actually, it's not. The products sold as "Norton Ghost" nowadays have nothing whatsoever to do with genuine Ghost at all; they are a completely unrelated product for single-user PC backups, and not suited for deployment. It's really a "lite" version of the product sold as Backup Exec System Recovery, which to show you how the world of branding works has no technical relationship to the Backup Exec product line either.

The latest version of real Ghost, which is the classic product for deploying machines is Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 which will release in a couple weeks and is the one that is designed (and properly licensed) to deal with your situation.

There are several ways to achieve what you want using the pieces in GSS, but the piece that lets you do the local recovery (SrFixMBR) with a special key at boot really has woeful documentation at present. Like I said, I need to write a guide to using that once we ship.