Norton Ghost Question V10 / V9 ?

Jon Frost · 31 Oct 2006 at 09:52

Morning All,

Ive got a question on Norton Ghost:

Our company is going to be changing from Powerquest drive image over to Norton ghost **.(as powerquest been taken over by norton)

Now ive been reading a lot of articles which mention that ghost isnt all that its cracked up to be. Many people prefering V9 to V10 because it works in Dos rather than in the windows enviroment.

We will be using whatever software we go for, to create images of computers (laptops and desktops) which we want to be able to burn to a disk and distribute through out the company on DVD's / CD's. for other members of our IT team to image new computers with.

We need whatever software we chose to be able to image a "blank" computer (without needing to load prior software on the computer.)

It may be that Ghost is not the solution but i would be interested in what people have to say on the topic.

Thanks

Jon

InsomniaCalls · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:19

v9 works in windows rather than DOS, which is a bit :/ for reliability.
Not sure about v10 but all of the people I know who use ghost still use 2003.

Jon Frost · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:21

thanks.

It seems a shame to buy "old" software for a new task.

Anyone who has used ghost at all, could you voice your experiances please.

Thanks

Jon

Captain Fizz · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:55

Jon Frost said:
We need whatever software we chose to be able to image a "blank" computer (without needing to load prior software on the computer.)

So a PC with OS on but not programs?

Then Ghost v8 should do the trick nicely.
(Or the ghostpe.exe from the 2003 version)

It will do exactly what you need it to do.
You can also use ghostwalk to change the name and SSID of each PC before rolling out.

Jon Frost · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:30

Captain Fizz said:
So a PC with OS on but not programs?

Then Ghost v8 should do the trick nicely.
(Or the ghostpe.exe from the 2003 version)

It will do exactly what you need it to do.
You can also use ghostwalk to change the name and SSID of each PC before rolling out.

Sorry, no i should have made it more clear.

We're after some software to clone a computer with OS and applications/ settings. Burn this image to DVD/CD then distribute it throughout the company. so other same spec computers can be imaged up quickly

Ta

J

Captain Fizz · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:43

Yep - Ghost will do perfectly for that.
Or Alteris.
Our standard build has office, software deployment software, tel books, dial up software etc etc all pre-installed.

Just ghost over, ghostwalk (or sysprep) and boot.

We've used Ghostwalk for v7 and v8.
I would recommend you run Ghostwalk to change the names of the PC's before booting up for the first time with the new image.
Why use Ghostwalk? To avoid problems like:

...you need to be sure you use Microsoft's Sysprep,
Symantec's GhostWalk, or something similar to ensure that each computer gets a unique SID.
If you have duplicate SIDs, then they'll have trouble operating in the same domain. The computers have an account with a password, just like user accounts.

And with duplicate SIDs, all of the computers may be trying the same machine account to connect to the domain. Only one of the computers will have the correct account password, and all of the others will tell you that "the computer account in the domain is missing or the password on that account is incorrect".

(http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=95278)

ted34 · 2 Nov 2006 at 17:24

Use acronis true image. I have tried norton ghost 9 and 10 and both caused big probs. True Image does backups and restores in a fraction of the time + has loads more options such as passwords, compressions, alerts etc etc