Re: The Perfect Clone: Am I doing this right?

Hi

While I don't know about the Virtual CD, the process you describe below is the process I use (more or less). Additional Comments below

furtherside@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Okay, I think I have this sysprep/ghost stuff figured out...having
never done this before (I'm the parent-volunteer IT guy for my
daughter's grade school - with just enough knowledge to be dangerous).
I'd sincerely appreciate any of you pros out there commenting on this:

I have a prototype computer built, with all the latest Windows XP
updates, virus protection, firewall, applications for the kids, admin
and student accounts, etc. The only 'tricky' things about this machine
are:

Depending on your virus client, you may want to put that into a post installation script. That was always one of the final steps at my last post, pushing Norton's to the new clients.

1. It has a product called Virtual CD installed, which creates a
virtual SCSI drive as a partition on the physical hard drive. The
guys at VCD said "we don't think it will work" when I told them I
wanted to be able to sysprep/ghost this machine. That doesn't make
sense to me, however, since not being able to do this means that the
machine can't be backed up and restored by Ghost, which (I hope)
shouldn't be the case.

2. It has Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit installed, which required
the primary partition to be downsized and free space left on the end of
the drive, to allow for the 'scratchpad' area for the toolkit to keep
track of changes made to the computer, which are wiped out upon reboot
(sort of like DeepFreeze).

Does this require a secondary partition or just free space? I have not had the time to play with it.

So, here is my game plan:

1. Use Sysprep, creating the answers file as required, and running the
-mini -reseal options to prepare the computer for imaging.

2. After Sysprep runs, the machine is shut down -- so next I need to
boot the machine with the Ghost 10.0 CD, and get network connectivity
so I can grab the drive image and store it out on my NAS. I'm assuming
that Ghost can do all of this from it's product CD - and I don't have
to boot the machine from it's hard drive (?)

I am not sure about booting from the Ghost CD. One of the utilities installed by ghost is a boot disk builder. This is what I have used to boot a machine to ghost it. I have retired the boot floppies in favor of a custom BartPE cd. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I'm going to do a full DRIVE image, not a partition image - so I
should be getting a bit-level copy of the hard drive stored out in the
image file on my NAS - correct (?)

Yes


3. Now, I pull out a fresh machine from its cardboard box, connect it
to the network and boot it with the Ghost CD. I have Ghost go find the
image out on the NAS, and I tell Ghost to restore from that image and
*also* restore the MBR.

I would boot the client computer off of either boot floppies or a custom BartPE CD, connect to the server and download / write the image.

At this point, I'm really hoping that the target machine gets a
bit-level image of the original machine, with the Virtual CD
partition-SCSI drive intact, and my primary partition sized just like
the original -- a spittin' mirror image of that source computer. Does
this sound correct, so far (?)

Absolutely.

4. I boot the target machine, I get the mini startup sequence, it asks
me to accept the EULA, and the license key (and whatever else I left
blank in the answers file) -- and I'm done. One machine cloned, 19
more to go.

With your Ghost server configured correctly you could blast all 20 computers at the same time. That's awesome!!! If you are to do this, I would highly recommend the classroom computer be on their own network as the traffic would be disruptive to other production computers. Ghosting one or two at a time would not affect the network too badly.

Anything I missed here? Any other pointers or advice would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks!
-Chris


You are very welcome. Let me know how it goes!

Joseph
.

Relevant Pages

  • The Perfect Clone: Am I doing this right?
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