Ghost Solution Suite

My current company has been starting to move towards windows 7. A large company,  we need to configure several of these machines, with multiple setups. My question here is will Norton Ghost allow me to clone a machine and transfer to another machine with maybe not the same hardware config, yet allow drivers for the other hardware to be loaded from a list? A Network image would be prefered.

First of all, this forum does not support the retail Norton Ghost product, and there is a link to the separate Norton community in a sticky posting at the top of this forum. However, it is highly unlikely that the retail product would meet your needs. Ghost Solution Suite, the corporate product from Symantec, is geared towards corporate image deployments, and can handle the support of different hardware platforms by use of a driver library.

There are a few design questions that you need to consider - maybe you already have decided on these but it would be helpful to understand which way you are moving.

1. What licensing scheme are you going to use for your Windows 7 machines?  Are you planning to use volume MAK keys or a KMS server?

2. It is commonly accepted that a Windows 7 deployment needs to adopt the Sysprep method to ensure that each machine gets unique security SIDs, as the Ghost tool to change SIDs does not work on Win 7. Using the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit (WAIK) and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) are therefore good starting points to understand the build process for Win 7, and tailoring it to your needs. The Articles forum has a lot of content on Win 7 deployment and related topics. 

3. Do you have a current software deployment system?  eg SMS, SCCM or Altiris DS?   If not, consider whether implementing DS 7.1 may be a better way to go as it incorporates the Ghost imaging and driver management tools as well as providing an industrial strength software deployment and audit platform.  If you are using SMS or SCCM - note that SCCM in conjunction with the WAIK and MDT also offers image management and deployment using the Microsoft wim images rather than the Ghost gho images.

4. Bear in mind that Windows 7 creates two partitions at install time - a small "system" partition of 100-200Mb and the main boot partition with the bulk of the operating system files. Both are necessary for Win 7 to boot.

If you have other questions, please post them here and the forum will try and point you in the right direction.

Hello all

I'm new to the forum and not yet sure where to post this question. I want to be able to Ghost my whole drive using Windows 7 Home Premium. I used to be able to Ghost any drive when using XP many years ago but it won't let me ghost win 7. Which Norton do I have to get that will allow me to do a "SIMPLE" ghost of my drive? Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.... thanks in advance :)

If you are an end user rather than a corporate user, then I would direct you to the Norton Community as referenced in a sticky posting at the top of this forum. They will be able to advise you further.