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Best method to setup and deploy 130 PCs

J

jtvang125

Diamond Member
We are in the process of updating all our current PCs for 2 offices, LA and San Diego. We already received the first lot of 30 and the 100 a few weeks later. We have talked this over within out IT dept and decided we will segergate part of our network for ghosting as not to take up bandwidth during operation hours. This would mean a few Saturdays for us. We will deploy the PCs at their designated desk and ghost them from there.

Any suggestions on other methods that might be better?
 
Ghost using cds.... much faster plus you can ghost many more at once.... we have about 200 pcs and thats what we do, we've done up to 60 in 1 day....
 
Or... if your machines all have dvd drives, you can split the image for dvds instead... and when you burn the discs, just make the first one bootable and you are in business...
 
Originally posted by: samgau
Ghost using cds.... much faster plus you can ghost many more at once.... we have about 200 pcs and thats what we do, we've done up to 60 in 1 day....
Click to expand...

Good idea but wont work for us. None of these machines come with cd-rom drives. We do have 2 that's swappable and these were only purchased so we can load programs and drivers. So 2 at a time won't cut it.
 
Hmmm... you could load the image onto the hard drives separately.... pita but like that you dont touch your network... even on a decently switched 100 mbit lan you are looking at about 2+ hrs per pc.... multicasting can reduce the time it will take to do multiple pcs... but we havn't done that in a while.... pretty much stuck to cds.. too many complaints about the network being slow when we were ghosting...
 
Our backbone is also gigabit fiber with cisco 29xx switches and a 49xx fiber switch but ghosting over the network 10+ pc has a very bad effect on the whole network....
 
Here is an idea if they are all identical, then ghost two harddrives since you guys have 2 opticals, then each harddrive copies entireley to another harddrive attached to a PC through IDE or a USB 2.0 enclosure. How ? that's easy go to the hdd manafacturers website and download those floppy tools/utilities,by which you can cloneharddrives, connect 3 extra harddrives to each PC ( the 4th is a harddrive that has been ghosted or cloned) and start cloning,that way the rate at which the computers are getting an OS and everything is multiplying each PC is able to install an OS on more PCs.
That should work allright for ya. 😉 and that way the transfer rate from a hardrive to another harddrive is much more faster than from a cd-rom to a harddrive, so you guys would be able to save alot of time on ghosting.
and especially with a limited amount of optical drives. .:beer:
 
GhostCasting.

We can redeploy a classroom of 20 PC's with an OS and App image in 45 minutes.....

Network deployment is your best bet over using cd's/DVD's.

setup a deployment room and network.... saves a lot of time vs doing at their desk.
 
You definetly can save a lot of time ghosting them in bulk before you deploy them.... we use cds mostly because the pcs are already deployed but the first time we got them we did setup an assembly line type setup and processed the pcs in batches of 5 or so... using both methods to maximize things.
 
you could also make a unnatteneded cd/dvd. i setup a dvd (xp corp) for my boss that installs office 03, visio, project, lotus, adobe, norton, 7zip, and a couple other programs i cant remember offhand. it is stripped, fully updated with all current hotfixes along with sp2, has thousands of slipstreamed drivers (found driver packs, bts driver pack if i remember right, and they have worked perfectly on every desktop and laptop ive managed to try), and sif file so that it is completely automated. right now i am working on rebuilding it so that i can install all versions of xp, 2003, 2k, 98se, and a smaller footprint linux off the same dvd. this one will have multiple sifs for each os, and be setup to install completely off the cd(no oem folder and no coping files to hard drive during installation) to cut down on install time almost in half.
 
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