I need to ghost 24 PCs.. none of which have floppy drives... I'm trying to figure out how to create a bootable CD using the NIC driver and stuff from the floppy image created by Ghost... I'm not having much luck..

I'm using windows XP, and have all that *should* be the necessary tools to do this... including: Nero 6, UltraISO, etc.. If someon knows how to do this.. PLEEEEAAAASSSEEEE HEEELP!!! thanks a bunch...

You will have to create it like you would the floppy, with an exception. You cannot have a multi choice, because it writes to the bootable medium.

Some helpful directions:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaB...num=1051349163

A good solution also, if the build is not too large is to make a bootable ghost cd, save track in nero, open it in the iso tool of your choice, and add the image in directly. Close it up, burn it and you can drop the image on a pc just by popping in the cd and booting the system. Tons of choices with ghost. My personal system I use a ghost bootable DVD to drop the image back on it after it get's toasted.

hmm.. I'm still not getting it.. I looked at the posts in there.. and it suggests the sids boot disk.. who's link has since dissapeared..

thanks for your help...

Also, it says that creating the ghost boot floppy adds autoexec.bat and config.sys and whatnot to the floppy disk.. Our Symantec Ghost 7.5 Corporate does nto do that. Here are the only files on the floppy (none hidden)

A:
--/GHOST (folder)
--/GHOST/GHOST.exe
--/NET (folder)
--/NET/b44.DOS
--/NET/DIS_PKT.DOS
--/NET/PROTMAN.DOS
--/NET/PROTOCOL.INI
--/NET/NETBIND.COM
--/NET/PROTMAN.EXE
--IBMBIO.COM
--IBMDOS.COM
--MOUSE.COM

Any other ideas/links?

I can't remember off the top of my head how to do it with 7.5. Do you have access to 8? You could always use the network function of the 8, while putting the ghost.exe from 7.5 on the disk( they are not cross transferrable for downloading the image). I'll ask Rick, since his memory works better and it's been 6 months since we did a ghost rollout.

What network card are you using in those boxen? I'll see if he wont' just make a "test" cd image. Of course due to license restrictions we couldn't give it to you, but my computer has been known to have lax security on it's file shares for brief periods of time. Why not try to email me, but be careful, that security might slip at anytime.

williamwbishop@gmail.com

I think it's worth noting that the ghost executable doesn't care what network disk starts it. It just needs to be able to see the ghost server. I've even had cause to use bart's network boot cd. Perhaps that is an idea?

hmm... do you think.. perhaps.. that it could work from telling ti boot from a jumpdrive?? I don't know how tomake it bootable or anything.. but I do have a jumpdrive..

or.. perhaps.. if all it needs is a bootable disk to tell it to start ghost.. I could extract a norton antivirus disk..add the ghost files onto it and reimage.. then i could use "recovery" from the norton boot disk and execute the ghost program somehow??

man.. i'm really going out on a limb here..lol

No, it won't boot from jumpdrive, but it will boot from USB. We use an external drive case with a dvd reader in it, we boot with a usb ghost disk, and copy, or we just put the ghost images inside a bootable .iso that we keep(remember that it breaks it into 2gb chunks.)

Our general rule is, anything under 25 systems we either open the case and do a ghost hard drive to hard drive or use the external usb. It takes time to set up our switch setup(which can do a maximum of 50 at a time, around 8 minutes each). I know we have a set of 400 coming up, and we'll have to get some more switches in. My server has unlimited capacity, especially since we use backbone switches with multicast. Depends on how you set up your deployment really. There are so many options. You could also do a build the way you like it, and use ghost for unix, freeware, that utilizes ftp. It's fairly slow uploading your gold image, but it's pretty fast on the download.

BTW, that is USB harddrive and CD/DVD only.

Too bad our company doesn't get us some hardware for this. We use our own gear. We use my server(dual athlon, fiber channel, gigabit eth, external array, 2 gigs ram), and we each bought a backbone switch(old smartsense's from bay). DHCP is provided by an old cable modem gateway router/switch. Traffic is kept off the company network(which is good, we would saturate most of the gear they have there).

You can build a good deployment setup, even with old gear. Just work at it. A few larger deployments and you'll figure the in's and outs.

OMG YOU GENIUS!! YOU JUST REMINDED ME.. We have a few USB floppy drives for some old laptops... I could use one of those I bet!! I'm going to go try that.. thanks for so much help man..

It should work if your systems are configurable to boot from them, otherwise, you need the usb ghost boot floppy to boot the floppy to run the usb boot floppy. Might be a hitch in there somewhere. Most newer systems should work though.