Ghost Solution Suite

Our company is using ghost 8.2 to image new computers for deployment by local drive to local drive. Is there a way to use ghost 8.2 to image the computer over network? eg without removing the hard drive from the new computer. The objective is to run ghost 8.2 from our office in NA to re image a computer in our network environment over in asia.

If you can boot the target computer using WinPE, and connect to a network share where an image is stored, then you can certainly pull down an image onto the machine.  However, it is unclear from your posting whether you want to "push" or to "pull" and image onto the target machine.

Ghost 8.2 is a truly ancient release and for enterprise environments, you should be looking at Ghost Solution Suite 2.5.1.2266 or later.  This offers push capabilities.

Do bear in mind however, that if the operating system you are deploying is Windows 7, do you have the network bandwidth internationally to transfer many Gb of image to the target machine?  Or do you intent to have image shares held locally in each territory?

If you are imaging new computers, why not use a portable, bootable USB hard disk to image each machine. This is going to be a lot faster than imaging over a network.

To clarify on my post we would like to push different images through the network.

The target machines are not new ones but rather old ones with custom images that might have software issues that we would like to reimage. 

Yes! we are looking at different opinions on which imaging solution would be better and bootable USB seems a solid idea.

Pardon me if its not related to my initial post but would Ghost Solution Suite have this feature? e.g create a bootable usb. or i am looking on other symantec product?

Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 would indeed give you the capability to build a USB bootable stick running WinPE 2.1. The product is woefully out of date, but there is an active program under way to update it and some interim releases are available. Just have a look at the thread "When will come version 3 of Ghost", mostly on the third page.  There are also instructions written by a user (Terry Bu) on how to implement a WinPE upgrade on GSS to use WinPE 3 so that Win 7 drivers can be used, as WinPE 2.1 needs vista drivers.

Or if you wish to create your own WinPE version to use with 8.2 you could start here:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe

There is a link in this article to do the same with WinPE 3.1

Since most of the installation would be done by the end users on remote offices, how user friendly is this USB bootable stick from Ghost Solution Suite 2.5? Would it be too much to ask a normal user to re-image their own drive with this? 

Preferably the solution we were looking for is to have the user plug in the bootable usb and it will automatically reimage the drive once the computer powered on. Can this be achieved by using the bootable USB you are suggesting?

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, I really appreciate it. The link you provided for creating own WinPE is interesting but unfortunately not applicable in our company.

The "user friendliness" of a bootable USB stick is entirely in your hands to create. I would never allow a normal user to reimage their own drive unless the solution has been written to be absolutely bullet proof. This would include some code to examine the target machine and check it is the right model for the build to be deployed, before any further action is initiated to reformat and repartition the drive before deploying the correct image. This functionality is not available in Ghost Solution Suite, and therefore you would have to write some code to run under the standard GSS WinPE boot environment to handle this aspect.  The other thing you would need to ensure is that each machine's bios is configured to boot from an external USB device ahead of the main hard disk, and here you may run into some issues depending on which manufacturer your PCs are from. Some bioses can be set to boot from a USB device first, but they do not retain this setting if no USB device is available to boot from. This means that the user would have to get into the bios settings and reconfigure them before rebuilding.

Given the requirements you have, would it not be preferable to implement the same sort of recovery scheme that is used by modern PC vendors, of having an operating system "recovery" process that is triggered by a function key?