Ghost Solution Suite

We have Windows 7 (mostly HP desktops), WIn 8 (mostly Surface pros) and Ipads that we use in our environment. We will be receiving, building and deplying about 200 machines over the next month.

We need to take an image that we have already created and copy that image to all these new computers without hvingg those new computers on our network yet. Essentially, we will need to build each computer one at a time, off our network. Until this point, we used a version of ghost that is dos based. It worked most of the time but does not seem to work all the time and the time it takes us to rimage a disk when it fails becomes prohibititve.

Does the new Ghost allow us to: 1) Make a boot drive?

2) Copy the existing image to that boot drive?

3) Then take that image and deploy it to each of the new machines??

Any help would be appreciated.

Arnie
 

It would be interesting to hear what version of Ghost you currently have as WinPE has long been a boot disk alternative to DOS and frankly modern hardware is way beyond the capabilities of DOS to support fully as it has no knowledge of SATA hard disks or large hard disk.

If you already have an image, then all you need to do is to make a USB hard disk bootable to WinPE, and use that to run Ghost from the WinPE command prompt to load the image from the USB hard disk to the target machine. No networks involved and the process is pretty quick.  Just bear in mind that USB2 is natively supported by WinPE but USB-3 will require you to add drivers to WinPE.  Some years ago I built an automatic imaging environment onto a USB hard disk for use by field technicians to rebuild disks. It would automatically detect the machine connected and choose the right build to use, or offer choices to the technician if more than one build was available for that model (eg 32 or 64 bit O/S)

The latest shipping Ghost version is 2.5.1.2266 which has a WinPE boot disk creator included, and the Ghost 3 release, with support for UEFI bioses, and Ghost 3 is currently in a public beta to iron out any serious bugs before release for sale.

If you have an earlier version of Ghost then you can roll your own WinPE boot environment from this technote: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/adventures-winpe-31?om_ext_cid=biz_con_cmgr_cp_20120221_pm

This uses the Windows 7 version of WinPE so you can use Win 7 drivers where appropriate.  The version in Ghost 11.5.1.2266 is WinPE 2 based on the Vista kernel and therefore requiring Vista drivers. The relevant information on getting compatible WinPE drivers can be found here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/do-i-have-correct-driver-winpe

Come back to us if you have additional questions.