Ghosting & bootprep

[Doug Gordon]

Up to now we've been creating our clones by partitioning the hard disk in
the target, running bootprep, then restoring each of two primary partitions
from Ghost images on a CD-ROM (one of course contains the resealed XPE
system with cloning support). I would like to make this simpler for our
techs by ghosting an entire disk image and restoring the entire disk in one
operation.

So, if I take a system that has been bootprep'd and had the primary
partitions' contents restored and turn that back into a full-disk ghost
image, can I restore it directly to a new target system with an
uninitialized hard drive and then just boot it? I'm mainly wondering if I
still have to run bootprep, or if the ghosting operations will save and
restore whatever it is that bootprep does.

Doug Gordon

 

[Slobodan Brcin]

If Ghost can save full disk (starting with MBR) and restore it on other
disk. Then answer to your question is positive.
You can do simple sector copy from disk to disk and it will work. And you
don't need to use boot prep again.

bootprep modifies boot sector on active FAT partition so it is able to load
ntldr. and there is also a small chance that it will modify MBR sector, but
I am not sure for second case.

I always preferred to write simple utilities to do this and similar tasks.
This is not much harder that opening two files one for read and one for
write, and doing read and write.
This is from programmers point of view

Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[Robert]

Hi Doug,

Once you have resealed the drive and the machine shuts
down turn off the computer and take a ghost image of the
drive. You can then ghost this to any computer. This is
how I am doing all the machines in our stores. I am now
up to around 1000-1500 machines running on my images with
no problems. If you need any help let me know:
(e-mail address removed).

Robert