Ghost, TFTP, PXE and network booting?

nmcglennon

Golden Member
Jul 19, 2002
1,170
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I am running Norton Ghost 8.0, and I already have images created (GHO files) that I need to deploy to an army of computers in a lab. (The computer technician before me left the images) The only problem, is that the machines are only designed for network access... they have no floppy, no CD-ROM, etc. All they have is network access and USB access.

So to get over this, I am going to have to serve out the boot disk over the network. I have heard about people using PXEs and a TFTP server to boot across a network. Norton has a way of using a PXE driver to network boot, but saves as a SYS file.

Now this is where I am lost...

How is the SYS file related to PXE? And how do I go about sending that via TFTP?
Any tutorials, comments, corrections, explanations, and links to software that could assist me would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!
 

Sideswipe001

Golden Member
May 23, 2003
1,116
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Well, it would be easy to deploy the images if you have RIS (Remote Install Services) installed on a Windows 2000/2003 server box (but this means active directory, etc installed). AND if all those computers are network boot enabled - which I'd hope they would be, without a floppy, CD-rom, etc.

If you have RIS installed, then you can use Ghost to add a ghost boot to the RIS menu. I do this here at work with Ghost 8.0. What you need to do, is:

1) Install Ghost 8.0 Corp Edition onto a server with RIS
2) Find out the make and model of the NICs in all the machines you want to put the ghost image on.
3) Use Ghost 8.0's RIS boot option, and pick the drivers for that NIC - sometimes using the generic driver will work fine, but I had issues with Broadcom Gigabit NICs when I used it - so I suggest downloading DOS drivers for the NIC and giving it to Ghost.
4)This should add Ghost to the RIS boot menu.

To install the image on a client computer:
1)Start the Ghostcast server, and have it ready to accept clients
2)Boot the client computer, and have the "boot from network" enabled in BIOS, then tell the comptuer to boot from the network (usually have to push F12 or something like that).
3)Select Ghost from the menu, and give your username and password to log into the domain.
4)Ghost will start up on the client computer. You can then connect to the Ghostcast server and wait for the session to start.

If you do some reading, you can automate 4) so that it will automatically happen when you start Ghost.

In any case, you can do up to 20 or 30 computers at a time this way; start the Ghostcast session on the server, and all the computers will get the image at the same time.

Hope this helps and you have the options to do it this way - it sounds like it's a lot more work without RIS (and without floppy drives!)
 

apac

Diamond Member
Apr 12, 2003
6,212
0
71
Originally posted by: Sideswipe001
Well, it would be easy to deploy the images if you have RIS (Remote Install Services) installed on a Windows 2000/2003 server box (but this means active directory, etc installed). AND if all those computers are network boot enabled - which I'd hope they would be, without a floppy, CD-rom, etc.

If you have RIS installed, then you can use Ghost to add a ghost boot to the RIS menu. I do this here at work with Ghost 8.0. What you need to do, is:

1) Install Ghost 8.0 Corp Edition onto a server with RIS
2) Find out the make and model of the NICs in all the machines you want to put the ghost image on.
3) Use Ghost 8.0's RIS boot option, and pick the drivers for that NIC - sometimes using the generic driver will work fine, but I had issues with Broadcom Gigabit NICs when I used it - so I suggest downloading DOS drivers for the NIC and giving it to Ghost.
4)This should add Ghost to the RIS boot menu.

To install the image on a client computer:
1)Start the Ghostcast server, and have it ready to accept clients
2)Boot the client computer, and have the "boot from network" enabled in BIOS, then tell the comptuer to boot from the network (usually have to push F12 or something like that).
3)Select Ghost from the menu, and give your username and password to log into the domain.
4)Ghost will start up on the client computer. You can then connect to the Ghostcast server and wait for the session to start.

If you do some reading, you can automate 4) so that it will automatically happen when you start Ghost.

In any case, you can do up to 20 or 30 computers at a time this way; start the Ghostcast session on the server, and all the computers will get the image at the same time.

Hope this helps and you have the options to do it this way - it sounds like it's a lot more work without RIS (and without floppy drives!)

What he said. Actually, you're lucky. I was given a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 and expected to ghost 12 computers. Had to sit there and HD clone each one because NG2003 doesn't have support for a ghostcast server.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
Had to sit there and HD clone each one because NG2003 doesn't have support for a ghostcast server.

But if you load the ghost from a network mapped drive it doesn't have to support multicast, it'll chew up more bandwidth but it'll work.