ghost and win2k server

[Guest]

Hi my company is getting ready to roll out a large number of servers, and i
was thinking about using ghost to do this. I know this is not supported
does anyone know why ghosting servers is not supported?

 

[Guest]

If you do a straight ghost of any NT/2K/XP/2003 you
essentially create an exact copy of the first machine
including its SID. You end up with multiple machines on
your network thinking they are the same thing.

There are a couple of ways around this. Ghost has a
utility called Ghost Walker which essentially changes the
SID on the destination machine. The other way which also
uses ghost and is MS approved is to use SYSPREP which
ships on the 2K CD. You build a master image of the
server, run Sysprep which resets the SID and removes all
security information on the server. Then before you
reboot the server you use ghost to create an image that
you can then deploy to as many servers as you like. When
you first boot any of these imaged servers into windows
there is a mini setup that takes about 5 minutes and then
hey presto each machine is fully built and ready to be
configured in any role you choose. There are some
limitations which you should read up on but I have done
this with large deployments of 2K Pro and once you get
the hang of it, it works like a dream.