Upgrading 200 desktops to XP on NT LAN

[netwerkassist]

We are in the midst of doing a large scale upgrade to XP. All clients are currently running W2KPro. We want to be able to use a unattended method as we do not have Active Directory running yet.
I have tryed running an unattended with the win32 but it created a new installation ontop of the existing w2pro.

Appreciate ideas!

 

[Peping]

With 200 workstations, you may have to use tools like Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition.

Peping

 

[polymath5]

Sysprep in combination with something like Ghost Enterprise or Power Quest's Deploy Center should do what you want.

I have not done this yet, but am also looking into it. =============
Mens et Manus
=============

 

[wpfaff]

Check out this knowledgebase article -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q155197

Hope this will be of help to you.

 

[kochg]

Do you want to perform an upgrade of those W2K machines, or a fresh install of the XP OS?

I would not really recommend upgrading, but instead to do a clean install.

You need to consider a few things. First of all, manageability: if you work with ghost images, you must document what's in the image really good, or you will get in trouble. An unattended installation is much more manageable than an image.
Second is speed. If you are going to deploy on 200 pc's, the amount of time it takes to install them will be an issue. Here the image is the absolute winner: it will take MUCH longer to deploy an unattended installation.
Third is applications: what to do with them? It all depends on your environment, but if you have a lot of applications, I would seriously disadvice to put them in an image together with the OS. If only office, you can consider that. The best practice is to work with tools like SMS (not my favorite), Altiris or Intel. This will make things more expensive, so look into that first.

Conclusion: maybe the best thing to do if you have to deploy an OS and a few application, is to create an unattended setup for the OS, so you can still customize it later (manageability), and make MSI pacakges of the applications. Then put that train (OS and MSI's) in an image (ghost for example) for the actual deployment (speed). So use the installation train only for one machine, and use that machine as a template to create an image for deployment on all other pc's.

Good luck

 

[wolluf]

Just curious - what advantage are you gaining from XP over 2k?