Ghost Solution Suite

Is there a way i can take a refurbished pc out of the box, simply plug it into the network and my kvm switch and detect it from GSS?

Or am i going to actually have to boot it up and assign it a PC name and the likes? 

 

I need to image a bunch of PC's, right out of the box with an image i've built. Our old method was,  unbox the pc, input an acronis disk, then plug in an external HDD and image the PC's from a kvm switch. Is there a simalar mass production method using GSS? 

Thanks. 

With GSS 3.0 you can build a bootable CD or USB. Boot that and push images to the PC 1, 2,3, etc.. at a time.

This is how we take our current Image and deploy to new machines we order.

Hi,

 

you can preimport your machines into Ghost. (MAC, Name, Domain,....).

Configure your ghost PXE server with the WIN PE5 pre-boot environment.

Start a Distribute Disk Image for the concerning machine, and boot it over pxe.

The agent will then find that there is a job for this machine, and start it automatically.

 

In DS 6.9 (the product GSS 3.0 is based on) you could use an Initial Deployment Job. Assign an image and batch of PC names (e.g. PC001-PC100) and any computer unrecognised by the Console would automatically PXE boot and build. Use with Care!

This is exactly the method i'm wanting to use. I'm basically trying to do away with physical media for multiple reasons (except for backups). 

 

My question is, how do i preimport these machines straight out of the box? To my understanding i have to do this via creating a txt file, however, i'm a little unclear of the format the txt needs to be in. I looked at the sample.txt but i didn't fully understand it. 

 

I'm also thinking that what i'm wanting to do isn't possible without extra steps i'm trying to avoid. For one, these machines out of the box will not be on our domain, but instead a workgroup by default, I believe i would have to take unpackage them, run their initial windows setup, drop it on the domain, and then import the PC. 

If i'm going to go through this much trouble i might as well image from an extrernal HDD. 

 

I may be looking at this scenerio all wrong though. This product is new to me. 

While this sounds nice, i don't believe i can use this method. I have others that bulid PC's on occasions along with many many other PC's on the network that may not be named correctly etc. (that's a whole other project we are working on). 

The import is easy to do.

In the attachment you will find a .txt file as example. It is configured to use a domain, but you can also put your workgroup.

 

Just put the workgroup name in the right column, by comparing it with the importcomputers55.xls sample in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\Samples

The MAC adress is important, because it identifies the machine.

Thanks for this example. This helps a bit. 

But upon further inspection the MAC is not displayed physically on the PC/packaging like it is on our laptops we get in. So basically i'll still have to take the fresh PC, boot it up to get the info then identify it from the server. 

I think what i'll end up doing is manually booting it to the network and imaging it that way. The only problem i've ran into this so far is that because the dagent hasn't been installed, i'm unable to run "Ghost32.exe" when it boots to the command prompt. I'm wondering if i can run that remotly from the server somehow.  

When you unpack the Machine you just have to look into BIOS to get the MAC.

Create your Windows Image with the dAgent installed.

After importing the machine(s) into Ghost, just start a deployment Job in the console on those you want to clone, and boot them over Ghost PXE.

By booting over PXE the job executes automatically. The PXE image of WIN PE5 includes the dAgent.

I did this for the first deployment on several classrooms.

In my deployment job I also included the installation of the Automation Partition.

 

You should be able to create New Computer records with the PC Names you want and apply the imaging job to them. Then when you PXE boot the new PC it gives you a menu with a list of names, pick the name you want for that PC and it should then image with that.