what is your process for making a ghost image?

[Busie23]

We have many different machines and rely on ghost to get them prepared quickly when need be. Problem is that we only have two images for about 10 different types of machines. For the most part the images work from machine to machine, but I'm wondering how bad it is to do this? Some machines take the image and fire right up to the novell logon while others detect everything and then work. If I ever get a chance I want to make different ghost images for each type of machine, but am wondering if it is really worth it in the long run?

The main concern here is that when you fire up a machine in safe mode you can see doubles and triples of some devices like hard drives, controllers, monitors, etc. even though it should only be in there once. The other guy here is religous on removing this stuff and the letting windows redetect everyting again, while I say it really isnt that big of a deal since the machine run and don't have any problems. The whole reason for the image is because we want to save time, but then he is just wasting time by speding teh extra 15 or so to let windows redetect everything?

Any ideas, opinions, etc on this?

 

[JRez]

I'm in charge of deployments where I work, and there's 2 basic rules I follow with respect to Ghost.

1.) An image can be used if the hardware/chipset support exists in the image (i.e. Ghost for like systems P2-P3 using 440 or 815 Chipset/Intel NIC/ATi Video or i815 integrated - doesn't matter what model - common hardware prevents duplication and redetection).

2.) Never try and dump an image for newer hardware (i.e. P4 - 845 chipset) onto older hardware (i.e. P2-3, 440 or 815 chipset).

It's also better to have a very generic, basic image and then build customized ones around it. Granted, maintaining the images with updates is a pain, but 1 hour of updates per month is quicker than the #'s of hours it takes to continuously reinstall apps such as Visual Studio w/ MSDN.

 

[Busie23]

Basically all of our old stuff has the intel 810 chipset and mostly similar componets. Then we have our new p4's and they have thier own image. It all works well for the most part but I'm knda curious as to why sometimes windows will have all those duplicate devices installed and can only be seen in safe mode. I'm wonderin how much that is affecting performace if at all?

 

[ganesha]

I always uninstall components like nics, modems, video and audio as well as changing the IDE controller driver to Standard before running syprep.exe -pnp. I can use one image built on a Compaq Armada on IBM, Compaq, Dell laptops as well as Compaq, IBM and Dell desktops. Win2K/XP does the rest.