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Cloning XP

Gorrillasnot

Gorrillasnot

Senior member
hi all....I hope this is the right section of the forum to post this.
What I would like to do is create a "system restore" disk for all the PCs I have built for family and friends all of which run XP Pro. I have a laptop with a fresh insatll of XP and all the updates etc, so i downloaded the XPSP1 deploy tools and ran setupmngr to create a sysprep.inf. When it finished the pc auto shutdown and then I booted with a ghost bootdisk and created a partition to image file.
I understand ghost can burn strait to CD-R/RW, but my laptop can only use the floppy or burner but not both at the same time (Dell 4150..has the media bay thingy)..anyways i was wondering if anyone knew of a good method to make a bootable CD with my ghost image. I tried the bart elghost deal and it didnt work. Also my image didnt get split.it is a single file aprox 1.6GB. I would need some way to span the image across multiple CDs

Any help would be mucho apreciated.
 
Hi there,

First off, XP images are tied to the same family of hardware that they were created from. You can usually restore an image to hardware that uses the same chipset, or a newer version of a chipset. ie Intel based ghosts probably work on newer Intel chipset systems but there's no hard guarantee about anything. Ideally, you create these systems for neighbors/friends and then you image the machine without sysprepping just before you give the computer to them. You only need to sysprep if you are deploying the images to multiple machines of if you just want to clean up any cruft accumulated while you were building the image.

I believe Ghost supports USB and firewire devices now so you can store images on external hard disks. That may be one way to get around your media bay issue. Another would be to boot ghost off of a USB memory key if the 4150 supports booting from USB. This does work on machines that can boot from usb mass storage devices. Another way to do it is to make a Ghost boot CD and swap in a blank once the Ghost.exe has launched.

One thing to think about is that some (all?) versions of Ghost can support pulling the image off of a network mapped drive. Actually, that may only be a feature now limited to the corporate versions of Ghost. That's the version I use all the time and am most familiar with. I know the home version is more limited in some respects.

Ghost splits images at 2GB marks but you can set the span size in the Ghost client options when you run it. Again this should hold true for the consumer version but I'm not positive. I'd suggest checking out Symantecs support area if you are still having problems.

Good luck! Ghost or an equivalent imaging tool is absolutely essential for anyone who works on more than a handful of machines regularly.

Gaidin
 
hello and thanks for the info.
I made a bootable BartPE disk that I installed Ghost 8 corp into as a plugin. I can boot my laptop and run ghost with it, but when I tried to output the image direct to CD-R and it asked if I wanted to include the boot disk to make the CD bootable I clicked yes and ran into the prob of not being able to use the ghost boot floppy which has the PC-DOS boot files at the same time as the CD burner. Is there a way of including the PC-DOS boot files on a BartPE disk?

Also when making the partition to image do I leave it set to default, Image All, or Image Boot

thanks
 
Hmm, in that case I think I would not make the image bootable but just include a ghost boot floppy with the CD set that you give to your friends. I know that's not the best solution but unless you use a ghost only boot floppy/CD that boots straight to ghost in dos I don't think you can use that feature in your image sets. Bart's disk is awesome but since you're not saving to a network drive or using the ghostcast server you may be out of luck.

It really is easy to make a ghost boot CD from a floppy in Nero if you have it. Google turned up this as a decent link for nero 6 http://www.bay-wolf.com/bootcd6.htm. Once you get the boot CD you should be able to remove it after you've booted from it and into ghost.

I would leave it set at default though I'm not sure what image boot is. Image all should do a sector by sector copy and image default images all the data and doesn't image all the free space.

Gaidin
 
Thanks again for all your help..I managed to make a bootable CD with my ghost.exe and backup image.
I used ghost explorer to split my image into 640MB pieces so it would fit on CD-RW disk. I made the first disk bootable and made the other 2 standard ISO disks using nero. Anyway the bootable disk launches ghost and restores it's part of the image with no prob, then it asks for disk 2. I put disk 2 in and hit OK to continue and get a pop up that says A:\ghosterr.txt. I save it to floppy and it says something about "Decompression Error -5" and I need to perform an integrity check on the image.
I still have the original un-split image so I once again used ghost explorer to try splitting it again and then reburned each disk, but still get the same error.
There was no errors when making the original image nor when splitting and compiling it.
 
First off, XP images are tied to the same family of hardware that they were created from. You can usually restore an image to hardware that uses the same chipset, or a newer version of a chipset. ie Intel based ghosts probably work on newer Intel chipset systems but there's no hard guarantee about anything. Ideally, you create these systems for neighbors/friends and then you image the machine without sysprepping just before you give the computer to them. You only need to sysprep if you are deploying the images to multiple machines of if you just want to clean up any cruft accumulated while you were building the image.
Click to expand...

This is not true. Sysprep allows you to put the same image on machine with totally different hardware. You need to just make sure you include the Mass Storage drivers in the Sysprep.inf file so it can find them on the next boot. I have one image for all our desktops in the company and it's at least 15 different types of hardware.
 
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