Separate ghost images for different MHZs?

[Alison]

I am trying to decide if ghost would be a good investment for my company, which has many different vintages of PCs. I would like to use Ghost to make a standard image, but I don't know: Do you have to make a separate image for each processor speed? Or, like, the hard drive size, can Ghost get around this?

Thank you

[Brydon]

Ghost should be able to image any HDD regardless of cpu speed or disk size. Another similiar product id Power Quest Disk Image which is what I use and is excellent so also check it out http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif.

[Alison]

Thanks for your response, Brydon. I guess I didn't make my question clear. I know you can image any speed processor, what I don't know is this: Can you take an image created from one speed processor and use it to write an image to a different speed processor? For instance, If I make an image from a 233 MHZ Compaq, can I use that image to write to a Dell 120 MHZ?

Thanks again!

[Target]

Alison, yes you can. The speed of the processors between machines is not a factor with Ghost.

[Alison]

Thanks! You guys are the best! I have found a new favorite website!

[bdunn]

The answer is yes ghost will work but the result most likely wont. You have different name brand PCs with different devices and different drivers.

If they were all the same series PC such as 3 different Dell Optiplex models you would have a decent chance of it working because they all probably use similar video and sound and the like.

With many brands I would recommend somehow grouping them and making images for a certain group which means you would have several images.

Good Luck
Bruce

[Mntsnow]

Bdunn,

Your absolutely correct. Due to the different motherboards and their chipsets and then of course all the different hardware configurations that will probably abound will make the final results mixed.

For best results do as Bdunn suggests and make an Image for each brand of computer (as long as they have the same type of configuration)

[Dominus]

If these PCs are networked, then a nice program to use to image the systems over the network would be ImageCast 4.0 from http://www.storagesoft.com . It can save you a lot of time, and if you have the disk space to store the images (which are compressed quite a bit), then you have a quick way to fix a system in the future if anything goes wrong (software wise, that is). But again, you must make different images for different hardware configurations.

Operating system doesn't matter, although the more common OSes (ahem, Microsoft OSes) have a lot more support, such as "PostConfigs". These are a serverside configuration solution that allow you to change such things as NetBIOS names, IPs, and to be able to add a machine to a domain all without having to physically touch a client other than to put a boot diskette into it.

Really nice piece of software that has saved me a great deal of time, and still saves me time as the year rolls on.

There is a fully functional demo version available from the website. Make sure you read a fair portion of the manual _before_ you start imaging things. Saves you time in re-configuring.

Good luck in your endeavour!

[LineGeist]

I use Ghost 51c on a regular basis to reinstall/install 95/98 on customer machines - it's a lot faster than the standard installation routines and it's very easy to use.

I found that, if I took a "bare bones" image - i.e. without any devices selected in Device manager, but with all the required software installed correctly - and burned it onto a CD with a Win98 directory containing the Windows CABs, the system would happily install its drivers from the CABs, ask for the ones it couldn't find and after several quick reboots I.d have a working system.

You'll need the drivers for items for things like modems and scanners although I've collected a huge library which I've included on my master CD.

So far (2 years) this has never failed me.

Hope this helps.
LG

[Alison]

This sounds like the best solution for my situation. A bare bones Win98 with all the drivers on the CDROM would work great in my shop. (And a separate image for WINNT)Thanks!