Ghost Solution Suite

Hi there, hope someone can help. I have installed GSS on my Windows 2008 server.

I have laptop that i want to image to GSS running on the server. The problem is that the server is located elsewhere (different subnet, but it has its own IP address). My laptop is on a completely different network and I wanted to know if it was possible to have my laptop images up to the server.

Can someone please elaborate what steps are required for such 'remote imaging' scenarios.

Thanks in advance.

Ashwin

The best practise of imaging a Laptop on different Network would be create the image Locally by connecting external drive and saving the image to external drive.

Create a boot CD/DVD or USB using GHost Boot Wizard.

Booted the laptop using boot disk.

connect your external drive and save the image to external drive and bring it to the Server machine.

* What is version of GSS which you have installed on Server machine?

* What is the OS of client machine?

Let me know if you have any Query

If you are not able to remove the obsticles that would prevent you from connecting to the server using a ghost cast session then you could use the ghost boot wizard to make a drive mapping boot disk.

When you build a boot disk there is a poriton of the wizard that you can use to map a drive.   If you then boot up from the ghost boot disk and the drive is mapped then you can create a ghost image and save it on the mapped network share.

Cheers,

Hi Harshu,

Thanks for the info. We are running the latest version of GSS 11.5 (I believe thats the correct version). The client OS is Windows 7 x64. Your suggestion is good but that will require an external drive etc. Is it not possible to send the image via the network (internet)

Thanks,

Ashwin

Hi,

What ICHCB is suggesting is correct. While creating boot disk you can add "Net Use" command to map drive in boot disk or else if you have created standard boot package, you can boot target machine in WinPE and then map it to network with "Net Use" command and execute ghost in WinPE, set destination as mapped drive.

Note: In boot disk you should have appropriate network driver added in WinPE. You may refer to following URL for "How to add driver to WinPE": http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH110136&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1316068586479

Thanks

ICHCB is right, follow the link by Pankaj but make sure your add the NIC drivers for Windows Vista 32 bit as WINPE 2.0 is light version of Windows Vista.

Hello,

Ghost doesn't support imaging over the internet but there should not be any issue imaging within intranet (as long as you have access to the netshare of client machines).

Hi Nitin, will the scenario you mention work over a VPN?

Ashwin

Depends how you intend to use the VPN.  

You could use the VPN to pull down an image to a USB hard disk configured to boot WinPE, then reboot the system you want to image so that it boots WinPE from the USB hard disk and then deploys the downloaded image to your target workstation.

I do not know whether there are any VPN clients that can run under WinPE to allow you to boot a workstation and then connect to a remote network share and image from there directly. If this were possible, the reason why I think it would be a very risky process is firstly that many VPNs are speed limited so downloading an image can take several hours, and secondly, if the connection is dropped due to internet traffic or some other momentary service disruption then you may need to restart the process from scratch, and could end up doing this several times if the link is not truly stable.