Ghost Solution Suite

Hi all,

First time post here. I think this is the correct forum for this post, but apologies in advance if it is not!

Okay, here's my problem; I've been given about 13 new Lenovo T500 laptops to build for some new users we have coming online. What I want to do is build the first one to our compnay spec; Office, AV, bespoke apps, etc then create a bootbale image of that file and burn it to a DVD, so that when i go to build the next 11 laptops it's just a case of putting the bootable DVD with the image into the drive and letting it install the image.

I've used this method before at previous places and it's a real time saver. But I wasn't involved in the process of creating the image and making it bootable. I'm honest enough to admit that I know very little about how to create images, let alone how to make them bootable, so was hoping that someone here could share their knowledge and help me mae the build process easier!

For the record I'm using Norton Ghost 2003. And the laptops I'm going to build are all identical so there will be no issues about different configurations, etc.

Thanks in advance!

London_Exile.

2003 is very old version and even though I do not envisage any problems doing standard cloning of standard 2k or xp boxes there could still be some issues as to the post clone OS updates. 2003 is certainly not good at all for cloning vista. It is the very old version of ghost and many things got fixed/improved/added since then.

If you would be running latest Ghost solution suite 2.5 (ghost 11.5) it is much easier. Run Ghost boot wizard,  select preOS (PCDOS, Winpe, etc) and add your image as user file directly to a DVD and then burn directly to a DVD without any hasstle. In 2003 from memory you would also use ghost boot wizard but you would only have an option to burn it to ISO. You will then need to use 3rd party tools to open up ISO and add image to it. You then burn ISO to a DVD.

BTW, trial version of GSS 2.5 ia available from www.ghost.com.

Cheers.

Eugene,

thanks for the reply. I should have made clear in my maiden thread that I'm still working with XP rather than vista.

I was wondering why I couldn't find the ghostcast feature in Ghost 2003 - it isn't there! I'll probably buy a copy of GSS 2.5 for personal use as I have a number of pc's\laptops\servers at home. At the very worst I could try and build and burn an image of one the laptops I've got to build over the next couple of weeks and see how it goes.

2003 was before my time working with Ghost but answer could be quite easy. 2003 was the last consumer release of "Classic Norton Ghost". After that you could only buy "real Ghost" with Symantec Ghost Solution suite aimed at businesses and enterprises. Obviously there is not much need to have Ghostcast server in the home environment, is there :) ?

Cheers.

hai

can anyone explain how can i create  a bootable ghost image and buring to dvd in norton ghost 11.5 
im using hiren's boot cd 10.1

Thanks in advance