Can this be done?

[Guest]

Greets - Looking for info on if the following can be done.

I work for a company that does PC repair for home users. We need to do
rebuilds once in a while. I'd *like* to utilize ghost for a general image to
drop on each machine, cutting our build time down greatly. The problem I can
see running into, even with using sysprep, is that certain serial numbers
don't work with certain installs - for example, if customer comes in w/ a
Gateway computer, I can't necessarily use a general OEM CD to install, and
use their legal serial number for it - it gets rejected. I have to contact
the customer, pray they know where their restore CD is, hope it's not
damaged, etc.. If I could drop a ghost image on the machine and use the
serial number on their PC, that would cut down time considerably, and still
be legal as far as I can tell, since I'm using the serial # that they
received when they bought the machine.

Can this be done legally and easily? Would I need a ghost image for each
OEM, i.e. one for Gatway, one for Dell, one for HP (granted it's on the HD..
but I've had multiple situations where the HD takes a digger, and I need to
build from scratch). Has anyone else tried this? Any contact person at
Microsoft that I could talk to to make sure it's all on the up and up?

Thanks
Matt

 

[DL]

Since hardware will vary by pc any 'Ghost' will only be valid for use on the
hardware that produced the 'ghost'

 

[Guest]

even if you did find a way to ghost all the different computers, to make it
legal, you would need licences from symantec, assuming you are using symantec
ghost, for all the computers that you put a ghost image on.

 

[Matt]

True, but utilizing sysprep will remove the serial, and XP will find new
hardware on boot. I've used Ghost for over 10 years, so detecting new
hardware is no problem.

Matt

 

[Matt]

I'll have to check on that. My past experience was that you needed a
license for the machines you made the image on, not the one you dumped it
to. If that's the case, I'd have to go w/ a scripted install via MS tools.

Thanks,
Matt