Ghost question

[gentobu]

I do on-site computer services, and I frequently have to Ghost customers files from a bad drive to a new one. However during the process, Ghost displays the files that it is copying over, which, in some cases, are named teenfvck.mpg, jenna_doggystyle.jpg etc, etc. Since I am on-site, the customer is usually sitting right next to me when these files are displayed, and it makes things pretty awkward. Anyway I was wondering if anyone here knows of a way to 'turn off' that particular feature of ghost. I've tried turning off the monitor, but since the drives I am working on usually have bad clusters or some other problem, so I would like to know if the Ghosting failed or not (without having to turn the monitor on/off every few minutes). TIA

 

[lobadobadingdong]

have you tried automating it? check the readme files that come with ghost they have a TON of features for the command line you can use.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Just did a search on Google and you can do a Quiet mode where no user intervention is allowed and the screen display is not active.

Never used this function of Ghost, but it probably entails setting everything up at the command line, which can be a pain.

Hope this helps...

 

[SaigonK]

You can get all the options for ghost by doing ghost /?
You can supress the need for prompts when encountering bad sectors on a disk.


On a side note...why be awkward about it? Tell him to stop surfing for porn with company assets....I wouldnt feel awkward...I could care less about it.
it's the companies issue, not mine.

 

[gentobu]

Thanks. Unfortunatley, I have ghost 2003, so the -QUET option is disabled🙁. SaigonK: I do at home on-site services (like dells on-site warranty repair), so I'm actually in the customers house looking at their personal computer, which is why things get awkward.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: gentobu
Thanks. Unfortunatley, I have ghost 2003, so the -QUET option is disabled🙁. SaigonK: I do at home on-site services (like dells on-site warranty repair), so I'm actually in the customers house looking at their personal computer, which is why things get awkward.

Once the Ghosting process is underway, make small talk with the customer and don't look at the screen...or something.

 

[gentobu]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Originally posted by: gentobu
Thanks. Unfortunatley, I have ghost 2003, so the -QUET option is disabled🙁. SaigonK: I do at home on-site services (like dells on-site warranty repair), so I'm actually in the customers house looking at their personal computer, which is why things get awkward.

Once the Ghosting process is underway, make small talk with the customer and don't look at the screen...or something.

Heh, yeah thats what I've been trying to do, but sometimes they are kind of pissed off/frustrated so it makes talking to them quite difficult. Oh well, I found the -FRO option that forces ghost to continue copying even if there are errors, so Im just going to do that and turn off the monitor.🙂

 

[SaigonK]

Ok so now I am going to tell you something about ghost you may not know:
Be careful with ghosting all kinds of systems if you dont have the appropriate license.

Did you know you have to buy a single license for each of those machines you are ghosting?
Even the corporate version requires this.

With any version of ghost you are allowed to only image the same amount of drives that you have a license for.
it is based on harddrives and not on the actual desktop, so if you ghost a harddrive, that is your license. If that drive is still around you cant ghost another one legally with that license. The drive has to be dead or thrown away.

How do i know? I have a ghost server running at my office, we ghosted 600 to 800 systems. Then we did a true up and Symantec told us we were using it "illegally".
I was under the impression that if you used the multicast server, the agents on the remote machines counted as a single license, but if you used the ghost.exe file you could run it as many times as you wanted...


Boy was I wrong! The license for us is like $12 a seat and we have a large discount.

Do the math $12 x 700=$8400
Chump change for us, I spend more than that on LAN cables in a year. 🙂 But for a small business it is a pain in the ass.