Can anyone help With Symantec / Norton Ghost?

[fishsponge]

Can anyone help me thru step-by-step the process of creating an image, and writing an image of a linux hard drive??

I have: Symantec Ghost Console (and other utilities) version 8.

I've installed it onto my desktop machine.

I've put a spare 250GB hard drive into my machine for formatted it using NTFS. it is currently empty.

I have two other desktop machines containing model installs of linux and Windows respectively.

I would like to remove the linux hard drive and put it into my own desktop as a third disk, and create an image of it onto the 250GB hard drive.

I would then like to put it back, and remove the windows hard drive and put it into my own desktop and create an image of it onto the 250GB drive.

I would then have my own desktop with a 250GB drive containing 2 images - Windows and Linux.

After all that, i would like to put new hard disks into my desktop one-by-one and copy the images onto the new hard drives as working operating systems, to build up new machines as they are requested.

Can anyone guide me through this??

I've spent hours reading the Ghost manuals and help files, but it only seems to tell you how to do this all across a network.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

[John Prophet]

I cant speak to the linux cuz I have no clue how it works filewise etc.

cant you do this instead......make some ghost boot floppies? That is how I always use ghost.....I make my images onto burned cd's.

boot from the ghost floppy
choose "disc to image"
choose the cdburner as the destination
burn the image to the disk(s)

then to reimage a hard drive you would just boot from the floppies and do "restore from image" and point to the image on the cd's

------

otherwise you could put the model hard drive in the other comp and boot from the ghost floppy and do "disk to image" with the model hard drive as the source and the big storage hard drive as the destintation.

-------

Probably 3 or 4 ways to get it done.

[John Prophet]

Quote:

After all that, i would like to put new hard disks into my desktop one-by-one and copy the images onto the new hard drives as working operating systems, to build up new machines as they are requested.

thats why I like to burn images to cd's...no swapping around of hard drives.....and I have a special batch file built (by a friend, not me, lol) that I put on the cd to make it bootable...so the cd is a self contained bootable unit...I start with a blank system, boot to the restore cd I have made..then a few minutes later I have a built system

With Windows Xp though you will need to learn to use 'sysprep' because of the product key/activation issues....you 'sysprep" a drive and it strips off the product key...THEN you make your image....so when you re-image new systems it boots up and asks you for the product key so each machine has its individual key etc.


---

That is kind of my idea of the wise way to build comps if you are going to sell a lot of em.

a) choose a good motherboard
b) do a basic build of XP, all updates, drivers, freeware etc etc
c) run sysprep to strip off the product key
d) image it to a cd

now you're good to go and you can build your comps with that motherboard very easily.

you would not image stuff like dvd software etc onto the image- you would leave that until after you re-image the new systems cuz not every customer gets a dvd etc.....so you just image the parts that every customer would get

[LeftCoast]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fishsponge

...After all that, i would like to put new hard disks into my desktop one-by-one and copy the images onto the new hard drives as working operating systems, to build up new machines as they are requested...

I'm not even going to address the legal aspects of doing this, but unless you're going to use the same hardware(especially mobo), I think this will lead to more problems than it's worth. And if the OS is XP, you'll have the registration process to deal with(again, not a good idea,IMAO).


EDIT:OK, I see JP has explained the process, and I apologize in advance if I used my "jump to conclusions" matt (I just saw Office Space for the first time; pretty funny.)

[fishsponge]

i dont' see what legal problems there could be if we have enough licences for all the software on that many machines... are i missing something?

Let's say i had a linux machine running VMware (and Windows XP Profesisonal)... if i'm going to image the entire hard drive (Linux, VMware, the lot...) and clone it onto some new disks for new identical machines, would i still need to run sysprep in the XP running within VMware??