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Advice please! (Read 9621 times)
cersak14
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Advice please!
Jun 18th, 2011 at 9:23am
 
Hi there,

I work for a small business that need to deploy images of XP/Vista/7 to various makes/models of laptop, netbook and tablet, I have been looking at using Ghost solution suite but having skipped through their online tutorial I think this may not be the answer, it will probably do the job but looks unnecessarily complicated and has many features that would simply be never used.

Up until now I have been using Ghost 8.3 and Ghost 9 as all the machines we previously run had XP and this was a simple solution, but now with Vista/7 in the mix these older versions of Ghost may not be the answer, not sure if they even support Vista onwards?.

Basically all I want to do is create backup images with drivers and a few apps then back them up to a network device/server and be able to deploy them reasonably quickly to another machine (same make/model), any advice would be much appreciated, thanks.
 
 
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NightOwl
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Re: Advice please!
Reply #1 - Jun 20th, 2011 at 6:24am
 
@
cersak14

Quote:
Basically all I want to do is create backup images with drivers and a few apps then back them up to a network device/server and be able to deploy them reasonably quickly to another machine (same make/model),

That's always the potential issue--deploying an image to a different machine--I presume you have been doing this already successfully based on what you have said.

Ghost 9 and 8.3 are totally different *beasts* in terms of how they work--but, again, sounds like that's been working for you.

Vista and Win7's default install creates a different Master Boot Record and Win7 creates a new boot partition--all for the use of Bit Locker--which is only available on the Ultimate version of Windows--are you using Bit Locker?

If not, you can change how you install either Vista or Win7 so it looks and acts like WinXP and then Ghost 8.3 would continue to be perfectly fine.  There are discussions on this forum about how that's done.

I'm out of town for a few days--maybe others can help with further questions until I'm back.
 

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cersak14
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Re: Advice please!
Reply #2 - Jun 22nd, 2011 at 5:24pm
 
The problem with Ghost 8.3 is that it is dos based and so I am not sure if it will work well over a network?, I have heard about ghostcast but not really sure what that does (should read up on it now..).

Apologies if I did not explain things well in my first post, the ideal solution would be to remotely or locally backup images to a NAS device or server. Do you think Ghost solution suite is along these lines?, I am also looking at Acronis advanced backup/recovery this seems to get better reviews than ghost.
 
 
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cersak14
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Re: Advice please!
Reply #3 - Sep 3rd, 2011 at 8:10am
 
Well after a lot of messing around I am still a bit lost for a solution to this, I have started using Ghostcast storing images on a NAS device which I am doing by booting to Ghost in dos with network support, I am going to try using WinPE/BartPE with Ghost32 to see if this will make the image transfer any quicker.

This would be fine as a solution if we only had 2-20 different computers, the problem is we get so many different ones for example a HP DV6000 laptop has a submodel such as DV6032EA, DV6033EA etc which usually means different hardware configurations, I suppose I could create an image from each one but this would take X years!.

The only other viable solution I can think of is to create a 'base' image of each OS XP/Vista/7 which can be deployed to all computers with the correct licence, I tried this with building in most of the XP driverpacks (from drivepacks.net) but this doesn't work as I believe the registry string is too long, but I guess I could do it with just lan drivers and then either run a driver scanner (not sure if these work or not) or manually install them.

Has anyone got experience in building a 'base' image and deploying it to many different hardware configs?, and if so did it work well?, or am I missing something that might be an easier solution?!.

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Brian
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Re: Advice please!
Reply #4 - Sep 3rd, 2011 at 3:27pm
 
@
cersak14

I saw this..

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=302

I've used TBOSDT to boot computers after restoring an image from different hardware. But just on an individual basis. I suggest contacting Support at TeraByte Unlimited to see if they have a solution for you.

support@terabyteunlimited.com

 
 
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