Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

We are running a office with 13 PC's and I've set up a automatic scheduled ghost to run on them all every Wednesday night. The image is stored on a small'ish restore partition.

I intend to make an option at start-up to press a button to bring up a menu (like DEL/F8 etc for the bios) that gives the option to 1: Start Windows or 2: Restore PC.
I don't want the menu to show up automatically, Only if a button is pressed just to reduce the change of an accidental restore by the user. Also I want the restore option to automatically restore the system partition from the image without prompt.

So far I managed to write the batch to run the restore process, but I can't seem to find a way to make the menu and make the restore partition start-up to run the batch.

I really hope you guys can help.

The PC's are all running XP pro and are on a domain (policy for the weekly imaging). I am running Ghost console 11.5

Thanks in advance
Johan Badenhorst

Johan,

A custom PXE setup seems right for you. Here are instructions:
To enable the automatic restoration, you would need to add these switches to the package:

-JA=sessionname -sure

The sessionname is a variable (it is whatever you name the Ghostcast session).  The Ghostcast session, as long as the Ghostcast Server is ready and waiting, will start automatically.

Thank you,

Randy

Thanks for that. I've read through it briefly and will do a proper study when I get a moment free.

I didn't see any way to do the restores locally (ie no network/server requirement)

I want the user to be able to restore the PC even when the server is down.

I'm basically looking for a kind of dual-boot scenario with the option to boot onto the 2nd partition with ghost restoring from a local image with a batch.

If that is explained in your link then I'll have another look in the morning when I'm fresh and ready to tackle it.

Kind Regards
Johan

Johan,

In that case, here is the article you want:
This is a more complex setup than in the previous article, but this is how you would use the Ghost Recovery Kit to create an OEM-style recovery partition using the Ghost software. Take a look at that and see if that meets your needs.

Thank you,

Randy

Hi Randy,

Thanks for that, I managed to get it to work after loads of tries and re-ghosts :)

I followed the guide(s) very closely and all went well installing PE, ghost, etc. But it kept giving me boot errors.

I eventually downloaded Plop. I didn't really want to use a standalone boot-loader, but everything else was so perfect I didnt want to scrap the project.

So thanks a lot for your help!

Kind regards
Johan