Ghost Solution Suite

This is not a problem with Ghost, but I figure this would be the best place to ask.

I came up with the idea to pull one of our images and put it on a VPC and start prepping it for a user. How ever when I do, the PC will not boot. My understanding is that virtual PC's are hardware independent so I'm not sure what I would need to do. Any idea's?

I'm using MS Virtual PC 2007 and have tried a couple Dell images. D400 and GX260 so far. The images work fine when put onto the corresponding hardware.

unless your image is hardware independant this probably wont work.  if you use windows vista, 2008 server or the new windows 7 you can run sysprep with the /generalize command to make your image hardware independant.  otherwise you can use the deploy anywhere feature in ghost to attempt this.  instructions on deploy anywhere are here: service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/on-technology.nsf/docid/2008050913544860

Thanks but I should have stated that it's a Windows XP image and I'm trying to avoid useing sysprep/DA and pulling drivers out. It's going back on the same model when I'm done.

I don't expect to get this to work but just checking if someone else has been able to. Maybe another VPC software?

VPC is not as hardware independent as one would like or MS will tell you it is. In fact it is far worse than VMware. In our tests while developing prorietary support for VPC in ghost for the next version we noticed that even a small change in configuration will render VPC unbootable. Usually it is a storage driver that is causing it - VPC underlying BIOS and hardware support is quite poor.

i have tried this with VMware with the same problem.  While the machine is virtual it works by emulating real hardware.  placing an image on this virtual machine changes its hardware inventory, creating the non-universal image problem.  deploy anywhere should work but i doubt its worth the effort to image a VPC, modify it, extract a new image and then deploy that image using deploy anywhere.

Thats too bad, would have been a great tool, hopefully we will be able to use Ghost Explorer to add AI files instead in 3.0 :)

Thanks for the help both of you.