we are thinking to do desktop image for our 800 WinXp workstations. What's the industry standard software / method to achieve this? Could anyone recommend a good online article? thanks
laserT, can ghost do it all without sysprep? I mean, it will be easier to just copy from master image, boot up the system and change the computer name, with all the apps installed...if have to manually join to the domain, that's also not too bad.
we are now doing unattended installation for new PCs, but a lot of customzied applications have to be added manually. don't have hand free option.
I've used ghost 8.5 ent for a few years to do imaging and it's worked quite well. Making boot cds or floppies was a nitemare to get the right network drives for all sorts of pcs/laptops. Then came PXE network booting which seemed to be great as long as you cleared static entries from the server's ARP table afterwards to avoid network problems. But even now I haev new laptops which hang "transferring image file" when trying to PXE boot. So I still don't have a perfect answer.
As far as maknig the images goes I've used nLite'd XP installs with junk removed and hotfixes/ie7/wmp11 added.
However I've recently (late last night) been reading about using sysprep and virtual pcs to somehow make an image that will install onto any (most) types of PC, to avoid having 1 image per machine-type that you need. The idea sounds like mana from heaven but I've yet to even try let alone succeed with such a great thing. On top of that I was reading about using a PE environment to create a WIM of the image and then essentially install to machines from that.
But yeah - I need to read up more - because if I could make just 1 image for all PCs/laptops the only problem left would be how to boot them up and get the image on.
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