Question regarding Norton Ghost 2

[gtnetadmin]

I work in a mediam size educational environment and we use Norton Ghost 2003 to create images for our lab machines (120 computers that are exactly the same). I recently had a hard drive fail and I restored the image. I then made several changes and decided to resend the "new" image to the server. Then I re-imaged a different comptuer with the "new" image just to see what would happen. Everything is working fine but is it really advisable to make an image from an image? Does anyone know of any tech notes that address this issue?

 

[jimp56]

as long as there were no significant probs in the original image, and as long as you do the obvious things afterwards such as change the machine name (and workgroup/domain if necessary) - I dont see any problem with it. im in a large corporate environment, and we get plain vanilla images that i tweak for our building and re-reimage (???) with no consequences that im aware of. of course, i'm assuming you have the licensing for windows and apps squared away as well......

 

[tyrant1969]

The only real catch with using a vanila image across the board is the SID.

All machines with the same SID pretty much have default "trust" with each other.

If you're adding them to a domain, I'd use sysprep. We use Ghost and we do is create one image and store it in the "non-domain" directory, then we put the sysprep software onto the PC, run the sysprep with the mini-setup option (only) checked and shut down the system. Then we image it again into our "domain" directory.

If you prepare your sysprep.inf file you won't have to re-enter your key, etc, and it will automatically add the PC to the domain.

If you're not adding the PC to a domain, I recommend using ghost walker to change the SID. This has to be done from a DOS prompt and can be done right after the image load onto the new PC has been completed.

As jimp56 mentioned, just be sure to have proper licensing for everything and you should remember that Ghost requires a license for each PC you load an image onto. So if you have 100 PCs and you plan to load each with Ghost, you need 100 licenses.