Deploy Win2kPro on 30 Machines..

[bob4432]

what is the best way to do this? hardware is pretty close to being all the same and each machine has a key of its own so this is a legit deal, just that the machines need to be cleaned with a clean copy of win2kpro on them, it is just the quanitity - don't want to sit down and do a full install for all machines if there is a way i can hook 10 up put an image on them and continue faster than individual installs.

what is the best way to do this for this many machines?

thanks in advance,
bob

 

[Kappo]

Ghost will do what you need. What you would want to do is have one machine be the ghost server, create one image how you like it, then run sysprep to seal the box back up and before you reboot the machine create the image with ghost.

Once you have your image, just boot the machines with a ghost network disk and connect to the server. If Im not mistaken, you can download the ghost trial and it will do everything you want it to 😉

 

[Arkaign]

Yep, just make sure you use a keychanger to change the keys to each particular license after installation 🙂

2nd on the Ghost recommendation.

 

[RebateMonger]

MS TechNet: Deploying MS Windows 2000 Professional and MS Office 2000 Using Sysprep

 

[EKKC]

ghost FTW
ghost 8 is the best

 

[ebaycj]

Use a supported OS, FTW !!!

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: ebaycj
Use a supported OS, FTW !!!

Win2000 is supported until August 2010. Good enough? 🙂 Oh, and don't forget Remote Installation Services as a possible installation option if you have a server.

 

[bob4432]

the reason win2kpro is that these are older machines and i have never had any isues with 2kpro. also, just out of curiosity - i had a bad experience with ghost a while back and lost some important data, has anybody used the acronis product or should i give ghost another try?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: bob4432
i had a bad experience with ghost a while back and lost some important data, has anybody used the acronis product or should i give ghost another try?

The Old Ghost or the New Ghost? Today's Ghost is an entirely different product from the older version, such as Ghost 2003.

 

[nweaver]

altiris...I can image 200+ in about an hour and a half! (and most of that is neffing in ATOT)

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: bob4432
i had a bad experience with ghost a while back and lost some important data, has anybody used the acronis product or should i give ghost another try?

The Old Ghost or the New Ghost? Today's Ghost is an entirely different product from the older version, such as Ghost 2003.

had good luck with ghost corp 7.5, then bad luck with ghost 2k3, the moved to acronis

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: nweaver
altiris...I can image 200+ in about an hour and a half! (and most of that is neffing in ATOT)

please elaborate....

 

[Shawn]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: ebaycj
Use a supported OS, FTW !!!

Win2000 is supported until August 2010. Good enough? 🙂 Oh, and don't forget Remote Installation Services as a possible installation option if you have a server.

Yep, and Win2k is still a good OS. It'll run pretty much anything that's currently out today and it's faster than XP on old machines. I was still using it up until about 1.5 years ago.

 

[Roguestar]

Damn, I didn't know support was ending so far in the future...

I've used Win2kPro since 2002 (upgraded to XP Pro end of december when I put this computer together - I thought it was about time 😉) and find that it's much more stable than XP and a hell of a lot less patronising. (No bleedin' search dog! I hate that search dog so much...)

It runs like a charm on most PCs that run windows 98 because its minimum requirements are a lot less than XP's, so it's easy to grab an old PC that's floating about, upgrade it to win2k and bam - you've got yourself a fileserver or webserver or whatever.

It's good to know the obligatory critical security patches will be being released until 2010 😛.