"Ghosting" an HDD for an NT workstation: anything I should be aware of?

[Dan]

A buddy of mine needs two workstations for his branch office but doesn't have the funds in the right line item for them. So he wants to do an end run on his corporate office (and corporate MIS) by having me build two systems for him. (He can pay me out of petty cash.)

I figured the best thing to do was take a drive from an existing workstation and use Symantec's Ghost to replicate it on the two I'll build. Does this plan make sense or is it too simplistic? Are there issues or potential problems involved that I should be aware of?

 

[SUOrangeman]

I think the latest version of Ghost (2001? released in August) is needed to properly restore NTFS volumes. I could be wrong though. Do some research on Symantec's site.

-SUO

 

[Radboy]

Linkage

 

[Dan]

Thanks!

 

[Pederv]

We use Ghost Ver 6, here where I work. The image has the basic programs (Office, Acrobat, etc.), then user specific programs are added. The only thing special we do is to start ghost with the -ntil switch.

 

[Jhereg]

If both machines are to be on the same network they cannoy have the same SID ( Security ID)
After you Ghost a new machine, you must give it a new SID before connecting it to the network
Ghost has GhostWalker and there is also a nice floppy sized program called NewSID


This is assuming when you mean workstations you mean WinNT or Win2K... otherwise forget what I said ;-)

 

[Spook]

Yeah don't make the mistake I did, and have your Pagefile on another partion when you make the image... Damn I could kick myslef... Win2k was all confused when I restored and it couldn't find its page file... I ended up having to reinstall...

 

[Radboy]

No sh*t? I have my pagefile on another drive.

 

[Lore]

My pagefile is on a different drive; you just have to reset it to the new location. Windows 2000 complained but was never confused to the point that I had to reinstall!

 

[MadRat]

It doesn't do any good to ghost if your corporate boys run the admin account. Remember, when you ghost its an exact duplicate, SID and all. If you are on a Global Domain then you have to change the MAC address and Hostname of each unit. If its a Local Workgroup then you have to do all of that plus change the SID. (Grab one of the free utilities off the i-net.) You need the admin account to do either change.

 

[Dan]

Thanks for all the replies. There's obviously more to this than I anticipated. Plus, it turns out I'm going to be dealing with Novell rather than NT. Am I opening up a can of worms or what?

 

[Radboy]

What file system does Novell use?

 

[overmars]

In case Ghost doesn't do the job, try this out:

Image Cast

marc

 

[Radboy]

Your link is bad. Here's a good one. That app is $995 .. dang. What can it do that Ghost can't?

 

[Dan]

I can tell you one thing: my profit margin on this job is way short of $995!