Ghost Solution Suite

I've got Ghost (8.3) installed on our main Win2003 server, and have successfullly added several of the client machines on our network to the application. I wish to setup some regular (weekly) ghosting of the client machines to a backup network drive but I'm unsure about what is best pratice.

I assume that I need to create a Book Disk of some sort for each machine, but have seen that I can create 'network' disks so that (I'm guessing) I can then roll out a copy of the machine over any one that has the network boot disk available? I'm unclear as to what I need to do first to set all of this up. Can anyone point me in the direction of a quick start guide?

OK. I think I need to create a boot disk, so I've created one with the correct network drivers. If I now create a task to backup one of the client machines, the machine restarts (through RDP) and reboots. It boots once then reboots to Windows, but when I get back to the Ghost Console, the error message says:

Ghost Failed:
Details for: To Virtual Partition
Failed to reboot client to recovery partition.

What does this mean? I've not created a partition on the client machine. Do I have to create one?

You shouldn't need to create a boot disk if the client machines have the ghost console client installed and are showing in your console.

When you can see the clients in your console you can their properties and set their client adapter to specify which make/model of network card they use.

Now you should be able to make an 'image create task' which point at your client machine and an image file you've created on your file server.

This task can then be scheduled to run weekly. Or if it was me (and you got the disk space) I'd do two or three of these tasks and run them in a weekly cycle as you would a file backup. This way you have several backups/images to use in case there is a problem with one or you need to go back further than a week.

Thanks Bryan, that's helpful. My only query now is that how do I create the image as there isn't one on my machine that I can find.

Hi Pete,



As suggested by Bryan, you can create images of your clients via console.
If you have the Ghost 8.3 CD handy, there is a tutorial that shows you how to achieve this, under Tutorials -> Launch the Ghost Tutorials -> How to use Symantec Ghost Console to take an image of a client computer.



I will outline the main steps you need to do below

1. Create an Image create task. Click on menu item File -> New -> Image Create Task.
   
2. Select the client machine you wish to take an image. Click on the Browse button to bring up the machine selection dialogbox, and select a machine.
   
3. Select the disk you want to take an image of. Do this by altering the "source drive" field.
   
   • If you wish to take image of a single partition, check the "Partition operation" checkbox, and select the partition number in the "source partition" field.
     
   
   
4. Create an image resource on the console machine.
   
   • Click on Browse button to bring up the Image selection dialogbox. Click on "Images" and then the New -> New Item button to create a new image.
     
   • You should now be in the new image properties dialogbox. Give the image a name, and select the location where you would like to store the image on the console machine by clicking on the "Browse" button. Click on OK to save the image.
     
   • Click on OK to close the image selection dialogbox.
     
   
   
5. Save the task. Click "OK" to save the image creation task.
   

To run the newly created task, find it in the tasks list, right click on it, and choose "Execute Task".



Cheers



Peter