Ghost Solution Suite

Hello!

 

I currently have the trial version of Ghost Solution Suite, which I am testing to see if it's a good fit for our company to fulfill our imaging and deployment needs.

 

I have the suite all set up on a server, with a DC and DHCP server located elsewhere on the domain. I have made sure to add WinPE to the suite/server. I can run the agent installer on another machine, and that machine shows up in the console. I have set up the Create Image job, with the tasks Create Disk Image and Modify Configuration. Create Disk Image is using the Symantec Ghost imaging tool, with no additional parameters. The disk image is set to store in \images\ folder within the ghost solution suite. I have checked to prepare using sysprep, win7 operation system, and to use existing key. I have selected WinPE as the pre-boot environment.

The modify configuration is just to rejoin the computer to the domain and rename it.

I click and drag the computer to the job and tell it to run immediately. I can see the computer restarting a few moments later, ocassionally giving me the Windows is setting things up notifier on the screen. Either that or this is when things go wrong. I am given the new computer screen. It asks for a language, location, keyboard layout. I go to next, create an account (which sees the other accounts), choose what kind of network you're on, and how to control updates. If I go through this, sometimes the job back on the console will be stuck on "Restarting computer to prepare for imaging..." for an indefinite amount of time, or it will throw the error "Could not boot to Windows Automation." I've tried searching the forums and the internet, but to no avail. I can answer to the best of my abilities any questions that would help determine the issue.

Thank you for your help.

Is your trial version Ghost 2.5 or Ghost 3.0 ?

When creating the WinPE boot image, have you added NIC and SATA drivers appropriate to your hardware to WinPE?  This step is essential as when WinPE boots, it needs to be able to access the network and the hard disks of the target machine otherwise it will not be able to get at the image or write the image to the hard disk.

Based on your failure to boot to automation, that would be my guess as to the nature of your problem.

 

What exactly happens when the computer reboots? What it should do is PXE boot from the Network card (NIC) instead of booting from the hard drive, this needs to be set up in the BIOS or you need to manually intervene in the boot process and boot from the NIC. The PXE boot should pick up an IP address and the address of your PXE server, the Ghost server, and then load a PXE boot menu, you may not see this, if it's operating correctly it may go straight into booting to Automation, WinPE. So you should then see the WinPE loading bar for a few minutes then a command window as WinPE starts up. WinPE should then get an IP address, load the Agent window, which then connects with the Ghost server to run the imaging job to take the sysprepped image. Allt he above is for Ghost 3.0.

Sorry, it is Ghost 3.0

The computer I'm trying to make an image is a virtual machine, using Hyper-V. I've set the boot so that the machine is to boot from the Legacy Network Adapter. When I made this change, it no longer takes me to that "first use" option selection screen, but looks like it's trying to get the image. I see the "setting things up" and "preparing for first use" screens but eventually it jsut goes to the log in screen, and the error for unable to boot to windows automation comes up.

I've not seen anything WinPE at all yet on the computer.

Server wise, I have not set up WinPE with anything. Besides installing Ghost Solution and setting up the create image job, is there something else I should be doing in regards to WinPE? Edt asked if I was adding NIC and SATA drivers appropriate to your hardware, but I think that's something I do after I get the image fomr the machine I'm trying to create an image of.

Is you VM set to (PXE) boot to network card first in the boot order - unless you have installed an embedded automation (bootworks) partition this is the way it loads WinPE so it can take an image of the PC after sysprep has run.

I'm dumb and missed a few things when setting up the VM so it can boot to network, thanks for joggin' my memory.

 

Now, it took the image. But there was an error message at the end. I'm not sure what that means for the image, if anything, but I'm in the process of seeing if the image works. Thanks!

If you continue to have problems, try and capture the error message you received when creating the image.

It's also not a bad idea to run scandisk on the hard disk before imaging it, to make sure there are no existing errors that might affect the image integrity.

Also make sure on your first image create task don't use sysprep.   Make a back up image first then if all is good like drivers and ghost settings and so and and your back up image is created then you are ready to includ sysprep in your next image create task (make sure you use a different name for your syspreped image so you can always come back to your back up.