IT questing (image cloning)

[Ian]

What do you guys use for image cloning? At my place we are using a USB stick to read/write images too. very slow when its about 4gb. At my old place it was over the network. Both times its been nortan ghost 7.0. Which is very old now.

what do you guys use? does it have any nice features such as automatic machine renaming?

(Y)

 

[paddymarsden]

we use ghost as its the best stuff out there in my opinion.

We have a vlan setup and if we need to ghost we add it into the vlan then from a ghostcast server distribute the image over the network. Thing is though you have to have a good network for all that bandwidth but we are running 8core fibre at 1GB from building to building then 1GB to the clients so we dont get any issues.

Like you said ghost is old but the ghost cast server and licences are cheap. Would never consider usb as its too slow.

With regards to your machine renaming, we pre-configure the image then run the mini setup utility from microsoft to remove the SIDS. Once reghosted and booted back up it will take you through the windows serial key entry and machine name screens.

i think we are on version 8? not sure.

That help?

 

[Ian]

hmm i wanted to stay away from renaming it myself. Apperently we had it on the network.. but it caused it to "crash" according to someone. On 1 gig though.

 

[rlees85]

ghost at my old work... was fast if compression was left off..

 

[paddymarsden]

haha, when you boot it up using the 'floppy disk' the files on those discs i think there is a way of editing an INI file to give it a range of what to rename the pc...cant really remember.

 

[Ian]

hmm.. might have a mess around with some programs ill accuire and use at work.

 

[k11 kid]

we use stand alone hard disk imagers, they cost thousands per machine but if you company does alot of duplication they are worth it, Ours image 8 drives in under 10 mins. Support wise to they are great

http://www.dataduplication.co.uk/details/IM4008i.html

 

[richj]

20pence says dd of if is quicker

 

[Ian]

that means more work.. taking out the drives etc! sod that

 

[richj]

If only that was true

 

[paddymarsden]

Symantec ghost all the way

 

[Arnold]

I don't image anything!! :s

 

[Hugh]

Ghost is what I tend to use. All depends on the setup. I like windows PE with ghost but that was a very nice custom setup which renamed eveything. Why not use a batch file with 'newsid' on your images.

Oh! and from someone who's imaged a silly number (over 3000 in one rollout) of machines for contract rollouts. Keep an eye on what kit you use. I hate 3Com with a passion as I find all imaging doesn't run properly through it. Don't know why but I've never had a smooth imaging session using the kit, it will work but not at the speed of say Cisco or Netgear be it 100MB or 1GB+ switches.

You not got a small switch and a spare machine Ian? That's how I used to do a lot of them for my last role. Had a old server on a 1 GB switch which meant fast imaging without impacting the main network.

 

[Ian]

Yeah i could hugh.. but i couldnt set that up in the office. I thought about doing it in the back room. but thats not the best place to work in.

 

[Hugh]

Well there's always an old laptop and a cross over cable solution lol.

 

[Davy]

I use windows deployment solutions on server 2003, which is free, big plus and use the boot.wim from a windows 7 beta as a boot image. clients just PXE boot, so NO boot disks are required. happily binned the old floppys, that were used with ghost. It applys the image quickly compared to ghost (last version ghost i used was 11)