Re: disk imaging

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On Jun 4, 12:28 am, "Mike Brannigan" <Mike.Brannigan@localhost> wrote:
"Greg O" <grego...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:abeca7e3-43c0-4b70-84f1-441cb00f0ceb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jun 3, 6:30 pm, "Mike Brannigan" <Mike.Brannigan@localhost> wrote:



"Greg O" <grego...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:75f0eb4d-62d6-4374-843f-17ca1635329f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi,

I work for a company that receives second hand computers, wipes the
hard drives, and installs XP on them. They typically do about a
thousand computers a month. They are looking for a cheap software
solution to do this, Ghost seems to be too expensive for this because
it charges per install. Are there any cheap disk imaging programs out
there that are a one off price and then don't charge each time they
are used?

Alternatively I was thinking of getting or making a boot CD that would
automatically connect to the network and xcopy or robocopy the XP
files off a 2003 or 2008 server. However this CD would have to do
partition creation and formatting, preferably automatically.

Are there any other cost effective solutions?

Greg.

If you have a Windows 2003 or 2008 Server then all you need is to set up
RIS/WDS with your images you want to install to the machines and then
either
PXE boot them if they have NICs with a PXE ROM or use a network PXE boot
disk to then do a hands free remote install of the OS.
There is a mass of documentation on the TechNet website about deploying
Windows via either RIS or WDS.
All of the tools and technologies for Remote Install Services/Windows
Deployment Services and the tools to make the XP images etc are all part
of
Windows Server and free downloads.

--
Mike Brannigan
Hi Mike,
They want something faster than RIS or WDS, ghost can do the job in 5
minutes and they want a similar speed.

Not entirely true.
You need to build a machine image then sysprep it - so you can deploy it to
each machine, then you take your Ghost image of it and place it on a network
server.
The time to deploy the image to each machine is the time to copy the bits
over the network of the image to the hard drive then restart the machine and
allow the mini setup engine to finish the job such as regenerating the SIDs
etc.
So even using Ghost to boot the machine from the Ghost floppy and then run
Ghost to copy the image then the reboot is a certain amount of time - you
say 5 mins.
The time to PXE boot the machine and then select the machine image from the
RIS menu and then copy it down and reboot will be virtually the same as your
current Ghost solution.
The trick is not to do a scripted build but to deploy a complete image that
has been sysprep'd, WDS can do this.  You need to reevaluate the WDS
technologies for deploying images not scripted builds and you will see the
time is the same and at zero cost.
--
Mike Brannigan

I haven't tried WDS but I used to use RIS and it took as long to image
a computer as a normal installation with a CD. Is WDS any faster, from
my reading it still seems to take as long. I was also looking at
Imagex but this requires partitioning and formatting the drive first.
.

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