Ghost Solution Suite

I am running Ghost 2.5.1 build 2266 and was really hoping this would work well, but I'm having issues with the hardware-independent imaging.  When I restore a hardware-independent image to a machine with slightly different hardware, there are always drivers that don't get installed properly, such as video/audio, chipset, etc.

This is despite the fact that all the drivers for all the PC's in my lab are included in the master/base image, so I would have thought Sysprep could handle it alone.  The image restore works great with no errors but there is always hardware which doesn't work right due to a driver that wasn't installed (yet is sitting there in the c:\windows\inf folder).  I am seeing this mostly with Windows 7 based images.  Is anyone else having issues like this?

This is making me want to abandon the idea of hardware-independent imaging altogether.  Are other people finding this all to work well?

Deploy Anywhere only targets NIC and Mass Storrage.   I hear you on the video and other drivers.  In the xp days you could put the path to the inf files in your sysprep.inf file. 

Some think like this in xp.

[Unattended]
    OemSkipEula=Yes
    TargetPath=\WINDOWS
    InstallFilesPath=C:\
    OemPnPdriversPath=\drv\1\0;\drv\1\1;\drv\1\2;\drv\1\3;\drv\1\4;\drv\1\5;\drv\1\6;\drv\1\7;\drv\1\8;\drv\2\0;\drv\2\1;\drv\2\2;\drv\2\3;\drv\2\4;\drv\2\5;\drv\2\6;\drv\2\7;\drv\2\8;\drv\2\9;\drv\2\10;\drv\2\11;\drv\2\12;\drv\2\13;\drv\2\14;\drv\2\15;\drv\2\16;\drv\3\0;\drv\3\1;\drv\3\2;\drv\3\3;\drv\3\4;\drv\3\5;\drv\3\6;\drv\3\7;\drv\3\8;\drv\3\9;\drv\3\10;\drv\3\11;\drv\4\0;\drv\4\1;\drv\4\2;\drv\4\3;\drv\4\4;\drv\4\5;\drv\4\6;\drv\4\7;\drv\4\8;\drv\4\9;\drv\4\10;\drv\4\11;\drv\4\12;\drv\4\13;\drv\4\14;\drv\4\15;\drv\5\0;\drv\5\1;\drv\5\2;\drv\5\3;\drv\5\4;\drv\5\5;\drv\5\6;\drv\5\7;\drv\5\8;\drv\6\1;\drv\9\0;\drv\9\1;\drv\9\2;\drv\9\3;\drv\9\4;\drv\9\5;\drv\9\6;\drv\9\7;\drv\9\8;\drv\9\9;\drv\9\10;\drv\9\11;\drv\9\12;\drv\9\13;\drv\9\14;\drv\9\15;\drv\9\16;\drv\9\17;\drv\9\18
    driversigningPolicy=Ignore
    UpdateInstalleddrivers=yes   
    UpdateUPHAL = "ACPIAPIC_UP,%WINDIR%\Inf\Hal.inf"

I'm aware that DeployAnywhere only targets NIC and Mass storage -- and it does seem to work fine for those.  But my understanding was that if you put the audio/video and other drivers into the master image, sysprep would be able to find them and install them after you restore the image to a new PC.  This has just not been the case, I've found.  Am I doing something wrong?

After the restore, I can manually go to the PC and use the standard Windows 7 update driver interface to point to the driver on the hard drive and it installs perfectly.  Since this works I would have hoped that sysprep could do this automatically.

Will Ghost's DeployAnywhere ever support the other driver types?  I heard in GSS 3.0, but then I heard that has been delayed and may never happen.  Is this true?

Not sure on 3 but I have heard the same.      We are not deploying 7 in our shop yet so I can't say on the drivers in 7 I looked got discurraged and never looked back.   In xp I had to put the path to each driver file's folder.  I imagine that 7 and vista have some simular meathod.   Just never chased it down.  

Good luck on the search. 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744282(WS.10).aspx