Ghost boot partition and virtual partition. You'll need those if you are managing clients from a Console. Virtual partition is GSS Console preferred method. Ghost boot partition is a dedicated partition that is created on your client machine that always contains ghost and preos files. Virtual partition on the other hand is "virtual". It is built out of your OS partition space and is non-persistent in the partition table.
If you are doing one off imaging then you can use any other boot option that suits you - CD/USB/One click VP.

Hey thanks for the info Eugene.  
However I think the only reason I'm being asked to check out the ghost partition is the hassle of using the cd-rom if windows isn't available.  So what would you recommend in that situation? Obvioiusly without the client running on the pc b/c windows is broken the console doesnt see it...or communicate with it.
Is there a way, besides cd-rom/floppy, to get the console to see the computer?


Secondly...

The "auto-naming" feature...that we were told will join the domain but also name the pc's for us.....
Quick question....
IF we ghost an entire building...How will it know that I want the pc's in this office to be named 1, 2 and 3 and the pc's in the other office named a, b and c?   Not only named that but the one closest to the door is named 1 then the middle one is 2 and so on...
Is there any order to the naming or does just say....1st one up is the first name available so there might not be any rhyme or reason....

Sorry to split the questions but this just came up tonight in conversation...

There are few ptions. For instance you can create and run managed PXE (TCP/IP) boot package. This will connect back to your Console and you can manage this client. GBP is the other one.
Auto-naming feature etc. - I am not the best person to tell you about it, I'll ask person who is more knowlegable than I am but in a nutshell. You create new task and select clone and configuration steps. In the configuration step (post clone) you can define new configuration that you specify how you want you computers to be named, how to join to domain etc. I dont know whether you can control down to 'first from the door' :) but you certainly have reasonable control. And if yo ureally want to down to 'first from the door' you can always narrow down your computer groups and assign tasks to smaller groups of computers each having own configuration settings.
Cheers.

Ability to change a computer name is available as part of the configuration step of a Console task. Depending on the circumstances there are number of possible scenarios it can be used in.

When imaging computers that already have windows you might want those computers to retain their names. You can do it by choosing to use the Default configuration when defining the configuration step

If you want to change the names of a group of computers than you can do it by creating a configuration definition that allows for template settings. You can use that definition when imaging a group of computers by selecting Template configuration. It will give each of the machines a different name but there is no control over which machine gets what name. The names are generated out of a template by substituting the star characters with numbers.

If you need a level of control where you assign a specific name to a specific computer than you need to use Custom configuration. The configuration set needs to be defined for each of the computers. You will need to assign the configurations to each of the computers.

When a computer is discovered by Console when it is running from the boot partition and not Windows than the MAC address would be the only information available that allows for computer identification. So in the scenario that you have described you would need to know which machine has what MAC address to give it a specific name. If you are happy with naming convention provided by Template configurations but you still want to give a specific name to a sub-group of computers than you need to create a separate machine group in Console and copy the target computers to that group which you can then use as a task target in a task that uses Template configuration for the configuration step.