do you ghost (restore) pcs with an image of another PC model?

[abc]

just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I mean I am not saying I'm expecting to get away with installing the specific nic / sound / vcard drivers of a pc AFTER restoring the 'generic' image, that is fine, but just asking if I can well yeah, make a generic image... ideally, 1 of win2k, 1 of XP...

I suppose when you install win2k off its CD, maybe if I recall, it is not until the PC reboots does the fresh win2k start searching for what types of hardware that PC contains, disk controllers, HD, CDroms, memory, bios settings.

So if I ghost it right at that stage, I've got a win2k image that is clean and generic, not yet customized I hope?

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

 

[Shaftatplanetquake]

I don't know anything about sysprep.

But if you have different machines with different mobos/cards I would recomend building the software up on each machine individually. Then you can hook up an extra hard drive and ghost over an image to it. Move to next computer, ghost another image over to that same extra drive, keep doing this until all computers have had images sent to that secondary hard drive. Assuming you can keep the ghost image filesize below 700 megs you can then burn the images to cds.

Or you can just keep that extra hard drive around and bust it out when its time to do a system restore.

 

[Confused]

Originally posted by: ndee

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

Providing they have the same IDE controller. Sysprep doesn't work if the IDE controllers are different (say going from Via to Intel etc)


Confused

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: Confused

Originally posted by: ndee

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

Providing they have the same IDE controller. Sysprep doesn't work if the IDE controllers are different (say going from Via to Intel etc)


Confused

I c, didn't know that. I stand corrected.

 

[Sketcher]

Too many issues w/using one image to create multiple varied workstation configurations. Time is better spent imaging each workstation and having a known good image to restore from. Besides, the image - if you are able to have it service all your varied workstations won't complete the job for you. You'll still have to finish installing the configuration aspects which you weren't able to incorporate on the image. (For home or small LAN use, it's just better to have a unique image for each workstations so you can do a restore and be up and running immediately).

For larger networks, you're better off creating a single base image to handle 70+ % of your install and then custom configure in groups. If you're fortunate, hardware and profiles are consistent enough you can have a few images to get it all done.

But that's just IMO. There's a lot of new product out that makes this task much easier - it's just geared toward corporate environments (thus corporate pricing). - Check out the links at the bottom of this thread 😉 -

 

[abc]

one reason i am asking if a image could be generic is because i could also be moving parts in/out of the pc case, such as the vcard, sound card, nic, harddrives, cdroms...

so this is in addition to having 3-5 different junk pcs in terms from motherboard to cpu to dell, gateway etc.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: Confused

Originally posted by: ndee

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

Providing they have the same IDE controller. Sysprep doesn't work if the IDE controllers are different (say going from Via to Intel etc)


Confused

I have never seen a problem with that. I have moved from Via chipsets to intel chipsets with an XP image made after using sysprep.

 

[Confused]

Originally posted by: Codewiz

Originally posted by: Confused

Originally posted by: ndee

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

Providing they have the same IDE controller. Sysprep doesn't work if the IDE controllers are different (say going from Via to Intel etc)


Confused

I have never seen a problem with that. I have moved from Via chipsets to intel chipsets with an XP image made after using sysprep.

I thought that way too, until I wasn't able to boot my computer once i moved from SiS to nVidia (K7S5A to 8RDA+). Going from PC Chips 810 (SiS) to K7S5A (SiS) (another system, same day), worked, so I now know that it only works on same type of controller. Maybe you got lucky, but mine did what it said it would do.


Confused

 

[Spamela]

Originally posted by: Confused

Originally posted by: ndee

Originally posted by: abc
just wondering, any of you have several pcs at home, all different nic, soundcard, motheboard, bios, HD size/make,

but use Ghost and made a gho image... do you make 1 image of each pc, or you make basic one which can? be used on all your various pcs. any tips?

I think theoretically, you can get sysprep, execute that and shut the computer down and then make an image, and use that image on EVERY computer you'd like cuz sysprep rebuilds the whole plug&pray tree.

Providing they have the same IDE controller. Sysprep doesn't work if the IDE controllers are different (say going from Via to Intel etc)


Confused

i used XP Pro SysPrep at home & it worked fine.

i tried it at work (intel dell pc ---> intel dell pc) & the pc booted, but the kb & mouse refused to work despite everything i did - so i did a fresh install.

 

[abc]

yes now i have read some stuff about sysprep and on symantec's site, how it is used in conjunction with say Ghost.

what is ths acpi / non acpi - advanced configuration power interface issue + HAL , hardware abstraction layer problem with images onto 'non' like target pcs.