Deployment Anywhere feature of Ghost is used for Hardware independent imaging ; You can have a Ghost image of any machine configuration and can be deploy (restore) on machine of different hardware configuration and make it up and running by simply applying deploy anywhere on before booting to the OS. Deploy Anywhere can be used in managed and unmanaged environment.
Managed
In the managed environment while performing the restore image task , you just need to enable the deploy anywhere option
And from the tab Deploy Anywhere you can manage the drivers in the driver database
The driver database has a driver database but if the required driver is missing then from the Add new driver tab you can add the missing driver to the database.
Unmanaged
Deploy Anywhere can also be run as standalone tool:
To start with , you can prepare a Win PE boot package from ghost boot wizard ,You can even select the option to include the driver database.
Deploy anywhere tool (ghDplyAw32.exe) is by default in the boot package. Deploy anywhere tool also available at Ghost install directory.
When you restore the ghost image do not reboot the machine, better you perform deploy anywhere immediate after restoring of the ghost image.
You can even perform deploy anywhere in the evaluation mode , this will make no changes , but reports description of devices for which drivers are needed.
Drivers may reside on CD , within the image or on the mapped network drive.
Follow these steps to perform the deploy anywhere:
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Mount the DeployAnywhere database on the client machine
If the network address is not configured , you can use netsh command line to set Ip address
netsh interface ipv4/ip set address <device name =Local Area Connection> static <IPAddress> <Mask> <Gateway>
net use z:\ \\<ip>\share /USER:<username> <password>
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Determine where the windows partition exists using ghconfig
ghconfig32.exe windows
<output>
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Run the DeployAnywhere evaluation mode using the following command
ghdplyAw32.exe /target=<output_from_ghconfig> /eval /ddb=<driver database location>
e.g ghdplyAw32.exe /target=C: /eval /ddb=D:\windrivers
This will list all missing drivers, verify these drivers are present in the driver database , you can directly check for the name in the driver database folder or search by the device / vendor id in the manifest file , You can find the location of driver database at : c:\programData\Symantec\Ghost\Template\common\windrivers or c:\Document and settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\Template\common\windrivers , You can just copy this folder and use for Deploy Anywhere.
In case there is an error like:
Unable to connect to the SmeUtil driver. The handle is invalid
Copy the SMEUTIL.sys file to x:\Windows\system32\drivers
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Run the DeployAnywhere to retarget the image
ghdplyAw32.exe /target=<output_from_ghconfig> /ddb=<driver database location>
Reboot after you get a success message.
For more information, please refer the
Ghost Implementation Guide:
Chapter 27 (Running DeployAnywhere from the command line)