Deployment and Imaging Group

Like others in the forum I work in a test lab. I recently tested Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 in our environment. 

The primary network in the lab is being used as a WAN, each test LAN is isolated via a router.

Ex:  WAN: 192.168.1.x

       LAN1: 192.168.2.x     LAN2: 192.168.3.x   etc

Some of the workstations, XP Pro or XPe, are limited in RAM and horsepower Remember, this is a test environment.

I was able to manually install the client on some of the workstations and tested Ghost Console. The workstations responded with 2 pop-up warning messages, but did not continue the image task.

I installed MSDOS client on some of the workstations, they only have 256MB memory.

Because the routers and workstations are limited in their capabilities, I would like to know if the client can be ‘instructed’ to do a partition or disk image to the secondary hard drive in the system. Instead of back to the Ghost server.

This will allow me to do a fast ghost image to the secondary drive, and then afterwards I can do a windows copy to the ‘image’ location.

When I need to do a restore, I can attach a CD drive to the second IDE cable.

Also, does the Ghost Client get imaged with the partition image?

There are a substantial number of switches available with Ghost which should allow you to nominate a source and a target drive and partition for imaging - I assume you would be booting either PCDOS or WinPE rather than hot imaging?.

However, I doubt that a CD drive will have sufficient capacity to hold even an XP image, so consider DVD instead.

The imaging process captures all installed software including the Ghost client, and in case this is a question about licensing, you need a separate license for each machine that has Ghost installed.

Assuming you have newer hardware with SATA devices rather than IDE, please bear in mind that PCDOS does not support SATA natively and that SATA optical devices are likewise not mountable under PCDOS unless the system bios makes some provision for this. Consequently, using WinPE boot media gives you a platform that is compatible with both old and new technology.

I have a secondary hard drive in the older IDE systems to put the image(s) on. These would be MSDOS clients because of the memory limitations, and it is faster because the memory is not taken for Linux to run. WinPE will not boot because of the limitations of the workstation.

The newer workstations that have SATA drives can use the other clients to perform the imaging. For these I have not decided which one to use, will try WinPE first.

Back to the original question, when using Ghost Solution Suite, can you over-ride the clients sending the images back to the 'Ghost Server' and just use the 2nd drive in the workstation?