Making a generic ghost image in windows 98se? Can it be done?

[Busie23]

I heard about this sysprep utility that you can use for XP to setup a generic ghots image for multiple different machines? Is there something I can do like that for windows 98se? Basically I have about 10 different machines and we are constantly making updates and its a reall pain in the butt to make 10 new images everytime we change something.

I know we should have only one type of machine, or not update stuff as often but that isn't an option because I'm not in charge.

 

[Codewiz]

Yep.....

It is more work but it can be done. After you have the system setup right just go into the device manager and remove all the hardware. Shut down the machine and reboot into dos to ghost the drive.

 

[Busie23]

I was kinda thinking that, but some people on here seem to think that you will run into potential problems with some drivers sticking aroud etc. We have machines ranging from Celeron 500's up to Pentium IV 1.8's. What are the odds that this will create some type of problems whenever you try to ghost a different machine?

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: Busie23
I was kinda thinking that, but some people on here seem to think that you will run into potential problems with some drivers sticking aroud etc. We have machines ranging from Celeron 500's up to Pentium IV 1.8's. What are the odds that this will create some type of problems whenever you try to ghost a different machine?

Truthfully I probably can't help you too much. I haven't run Win98 in a long time and I haven't deployed it in any job. The reason I knew about sysprep was because I had to deploy 300 machines(different hardware) at work and I sure as hell wasn't going to install all that software on each one.

I do remember back in the day that when I upgraded my motherboard on Win98, I would just boot into safe mode and remove the old hardware information. It never gave me a problem.

Win98 is MUCH more forgiving compared to 2000 and XP.

 

[Busie23]

Well I threw in the new board and removed all the devices and upon reboot it is locking up. Its weird cause it seemed to work ok on one machine, then the second one is having all kinds of probs.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: Busie23
Well I threw in the new board and removed all the devices and upon reboot it is locking up. Its weird cause it seemed to work ok on one machine, then the second one is having all kinds of probs.

Could you boot into safe mode?

 

[Busie23]

I can get into safe mode, so I went and removed all of the devices again and rebooted, and it did the same thing. So rebooted removed all the devices, installed the latest 4 in1 drivers and then let it redetect everything. Again it kept freezing up. So then I reinstalled windows, thinking that might help, but it still freezes up.

Its weird because some devices are getting installed twice, like the mouse, keyboard, hard drive, and some components under sytem devices. So even though I remove this stuff upon reboot it will install, and then when I have to reboot againg it re-reinstalls a few things?

 

[YoungAnimaniac]

You're going to run into problems doing this any time the motherboards are sufficiently different. We used to have to create ghost images for 7-8 different platforms when we did a release, and it drove me nuts. I did find info at the time about Sysprep, but I'm pretty sure it's just for Win2k, and it wouldn't solve all your problems anyway.

Ghosting isn't a very scalable solution for rolling out software updates. Most of the time, you're better off with an installation package like Installshield.

 

[tcsenter]

I heard about this sysprep utility that you can use for XP to setup a generic ghots image for multiple different machines? Is there something I can do like that for windows 98se? Basically I have about 10 different machines and we are constantly making updates and its a reall pain in the butt to make 10 new images everytime we change something.

There is really nothing you can do in 98SE unless your configurations are substantially similar (differing only in non-driver critical areas like HDD capacity, RAM amount, CD-ROM make/speeds, or processor speeds). A Win9x 'roll-out' deployment image will still require the system to go through at least one PnP hardware detection phase, one end-user input phase, and two reboots.

You can go to Microsoft's support or Technet pages and search for KB articles and white papers concerning cloned deployment or rollout of Windows 98. I've come across a few articles while fiddling around there but I don't have any links to them.