The Perfect Clone: Am I doing this right?

[furtherside]

Okay, I think I have this sysprep/ghost stuff figured out...having
never done this before (I'm the parent-volunteer IT guy for my
daughter's grade school - with just enough knowledge to be dangerous).
I'd sincerely appreciate any of you pros out there commenting on this:

I have a prototype computer built, with all the latest Windows XP
updates, virus protection, firewall, applications for the kids, admin
and student accounts, etc. The only 'tricky' things about this machine
are:

1. It has a product called Virtual CD installed, which creates a
virtual SCSI drive as a partition on the physical hard drive. The
guys at VCD said "we don't think it will work" when I told them I
wanted to be able to sysprep/ghost this machine. That doesn't make
sense to me, however, since not being able to do this means that the
machine can't be backed up and restored by Ghost, which (I hope)
shouldn't be the case.

2. It has Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit installed, which required
the primary partition to be downsized and free space left on the end of
the drive, to allow for the 'scratchpad' area for the toolkit to keep
track of changes made to the computer, which are wiped out upon reboot
(sort of like DeepFreeze).

So, here is my game plan:

1. Use Sysprep, creating the answers file as required, and running the
-mini -reseal options to prepare the computer for imaging.

2. After Sysprep runs, the machine is shut down -- so next I need to
boot the machine with the Ghost 10.0 CD, and get network connectivity
so I can grab the drive image and store it out on my NAS. I'm assuming
that Ghost can do all of this from it's product CD - and I don't have
to boot the machine from it's hard drive (?)

I'm going to do a full DRIVE image, not a partition image - so I
should be getting a bit-level copy of the hard drive stored out in the
image file on my NAS - correct (?)

3. Now, I pull out a fresh machine from its cardboard box, connect it
to the network and boot it with the Ghost CD. I have Ghost go find the
image out on the NAS, and I tell Ghost to restore from that image and
*also* restore the MBR.

At this point, I'm really hoping that the target machine gets a
bit-level image of the original machine, with the Virtual CD
partition-SCSI drive intact, and my primary partition sized just like
the original -- a spittin' mirror image of that source computer. Does
this sound correct, so far (?)

4. I boot the target machine, I get the mini startup sequence, it asks
me to accept the EULA, and the license key (and whatever else I left
blank in the answers file) -- and I'm done. One machine cloned, 19
more to go.

Anything I missed here? Any other pointers or advice would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks!
-Chris

 

[Joseph]

Hi

While I don't know about the Virtual CD, the process you describe below
is the process I use (more or less). Additional Comments below

Okay, I think I have this sysprep/ghost stuff figured out...having
never done this before (I'm the parent-volunteer IT guy for my
daughter's grade school - with just enough knowledge to be dangerous).
I'd sincerely appreciate any of you pros out there commenting on this:

I have a prototype computer built, with all the latest Windows XP
updates, virus protection, firewall, applications for the kids, admin
and student accounts, etc. The only 'tricky' things about this machine
are:

Depending on your virus client, you may want to put that into a post
installation script. That was always one of the final steps at my last
post, pushing Norton's to the new clients.

1. It has a product called Virtual CD installed, which creates a
virtual SCSI drive as a partition on the physical hard drive. The
guys at VCD said "we don't think it will work" when I told them I
wanted to be able to sysprep/ghost this machine. That doesn't make
sense to me, however, since not being able to do this means that the
machine can't be backed up and restored by Ghost, which (I hope)
shouldn't be the case.

2. It has Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit installed, which required
the primary partition to be downsized and free space left on the end of
the drive, to allow for the 'scratchpad' area for the toolkit to keep
track of changes made to the computer, which are wiped out upon reboot
(sort of like DeepFreeze).

Does this require a secondary partition or just free space? I have not
had the time to play with it.

So, here is my game plan:

1. Use Sysprep, creating the answers file as required, and running the
-mini -reseal options to prepare the computer for imaging.

2. After Sysprep runs, the machine is shut down -- so next I need to
boot the machine with the Ghost 10.0 CD, and get network connectivity
so I can grab the drive image and store it out on my NAS. I'm assuming
that Ghost can do all of this from it's product CD - and I don't have
to boot the machine from it's hard drive (?)

I am not sure about booting from the Ghost CD. One of the utilities
installed by ghost is a boot disk builder. This is what I have used to
boot a machine to ghost it. I have retired the boot floppies in favor
of a custom BartPE cd. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I'm going to do a full DRIVE image, not a partition image - so I
should be getting a bit-level copy of the hard drive stored out in the
image file on my NAS - correct (?)
Yes


3. Now, I pull out a fresh machine from its cardboard box, connect it
to the network and boot it with the Ghost CD. I have Ghost go find the
image out on the NAS, and I tell Ghost to restore from that image and
*also* restore the MBR.

I would boot the client computer off of either boot floppies or a custom
BartPE CD, connect to the server and download / write the image.

At this point, I'm really hoping that the target machine gets a
bit-level image of the original machine, with the Virtual CD
partition-SCSI drive intact, and my primary partition sized just like
the original -- a spittin' mirror image of that source computer. Does
this sound correct, so far (?)
Absolutely.

4. I boot the target machine, I get the mini startup sequence, it asks
me to accept the EULA, and the license key (and whatever else I left
blank in the answers file) -- and I'm done. One machine cloned, 19
more to go.

With your Ghost server configured correctly you could blast all 20
computers at the same time. That's awesome!!! If you are to do this, I
would highly recommend the classroom computer be on their own network as
the traffic would be disruptive to other production computers. Ghosting
one or two at a time would not affect the network too badly.

Anything I missed here? Any other pointers or advice would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks!
-Chris

You are very welcome. Let me know how it goes!

Joseph

 

[furtherside]

Depending on your virus client, you may want to put that into a post
installation script. That was always one of the final steps at my last
post, pushing Norton's to the new clients.

Yes, I thought about this - but what I figured was to put the
unregistered version of the software on the image, then after each
client is built, register the copy of Norton Internet Security on the
client (I have 25 licenses on hand). Hopefully, that works.

Does this require a secondary partition or just free space? I have not
had the time to play with it.

Just requires free space at the end of the Windows partition -- which
it says that it uses to create a 'protection partition'.

I am not sure about booting from the Ghost CD. One of the utilities
installed by ghost is a boot disk builder. This is what I have used to
boot a machine to ghost it. I have retired the boot floppies in favor
of a custom BartPE cd. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I was able to boot with the Ghost 10.0 disk on a fresh machine, and it
came up with a pretty rich set of functionality. I'll exercise it
tonight to see if I can boot->image to NAS->retreive from NAS all
without booting the operating system on the machine.

With your Ghost server configured correctly you could blast all 20
computers at the same time. That's awesome!!! If you are to do this, I
would highly recommend the classroom computer be on their own network as
the traffic would be disruptive to other production computers. Ghosting
one or two at a time would not affect the network too badly.

Well...my 'server' is a simple Buffalo Linkstation 250G NAS drive.
These computers are all on their own 1000Mb network, so it might be an
interesting experiment to see if I can serve up that image to more than
a couple of computers at one time. I pictured trying this, and the
poor little NAS imploding under the stress. Maybe if the cache is
large enough to stay ahead of the demand from the clients...hmmm....

You are very welcome. Let me know how it goes!

Will do!

 

[furtherside]

I would boot the client computer off of either boot floppies or a custom
BartPE CD, connect to the server and download / write the image.

Well, last night I tried out my process. I found that I must not have
been thinking about sysprep the right way -- I thought I should use the
-reseal option on the master machine, as the final step to ready the
image for capture. It turns out that once I ran reseal, for some
reason it shuts off network connectivity, so there is no way for me to
ghost the image to my NAS. So, I had to run sysprep with the -factory
option, and then use ghost to put the image out on the NAS.

Also, I was wrong about Ghost - I can't boot with the Ghost CD on the
master machine and just have Ghost do a disk backup of that machine out
to the NAS. The Ghost application actually has to be installed and
running on the machine, and imaged from a normal Windows boot on that
machine. Which raises a strange dilemma: the image created for
deployment now includes an installed copy of Ghost. I'll have to
manually remove Ghost from each of the clients I build from that image
(!)

Once on the NAS, I was able to boot a second machine with the Ghost CD,
and find the image out on the NAS and clone it to the new computer.
MBR transferred fine, and all the partitions came out just like the
master image. Once I booted the new clone, I had to run sysprep on
that machine with -reseal, to finalize the build process and reset the
SID info on the machine. Upon the next boot, it went through the
normal EULA and license key prompts. All is good. I have a process I
can live with.

The image is about 12 gig in size (compressed), and it took about 15
minutes for Ghost to pull it off the NAS and build the new computer.
Just for fun, I tried running two clones at one time. The time
estimate went from 15 minutes to over three hours -- so my little
Buffalo Linkstation NAS is nowhere near able to do what a 'real' server
could do, in this regard. Looks like I'll be building one machine at a
time

-Chris

 

[Adam Leinss]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in

Well, last night I tried out my process. I found that I must not
have been thinking about sysprep the right way -- I thought I
should use the -reseal option on the master machine,

Why are you using -reseal or -factory? Those are switches only used by
OEM builders.

Which raises a strange dilemma:
the image created for deployment now includes an installed copy of
Ghost. I'll have to manually remove Ghost from each of the
clients I build from that image (!)

You need to boot from a DOS network boot disk, map a drive and then run
Ghost from the mapped network drive. If you want to use BartPE, you
have to use ghost32 (separate purchase from Symantec). See
http://www.leinss.com/blog/?p=9 for more information on making a DOS
bootdisk.

The image is about 12 gig in size (compressed), and it took about
15 minutes for Ghost to pull it off the NAS and build the new
computer. Just for fun, I tried running two clones at one time.
The time estimate went from 15 minutes to over three hours -- so
my little Buffalo Linkstation NAS is nowhere near able to do what
a 'real' server could do, in this regard. Looks like I'll be
building one machine at a time

Here's what I do...take a box, put Windows XP on it. Get a Gigabit
switch. Plug your XP box into it. Share out a portion of the disk (I
actually made another partition and shared that out). Now you can plug
your other boxes into the switch and Ghost them down with the image on
the XP box. Takes about 5 minutes doing this way at work. If I am
lazy and want to do it from my desk, it takes about 45-50 minutes over
the network.

Adam

 

[furtherside]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in



Why are you using -reseal or -factory? Those are switches only used by
OEM builders.

I have a lab of 20 clients. Each has a vanilla OEM XP preload on it,
with the license COA sticker on the side of the box. I need to make
each of these clients look the same, with a TON of software and
configuration. They are for a student (grade school) computer lab. I
thought the best way to do this would be to use Sysprep and Ghost to
create an image of my "golden" machine, and then restore that image to
each of the clients. Upon reboot, the client asks for EULA accept, and
license key input and ta-da, I'm done.

I'm admitted novice at all of this, so if there is a better way to get
each of these clients to look like the master without violating
licensing rules, I'd be eager to learn how.

I like the idea of using a client (or maybe even a couple of them) as
the image server on my gigabit network, thanks!

-Chris

 

[Adam Leinss]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in

I'm admitted novice at all of this, so if there is a better way to
get each of these clients to look like the master without
violating licensing rules, I'd be eager to learn how.

What issues are you running into? We have a "school" where I work run
by another organization. I took the Dell OEM preloaded copy that came
on the laptop and put Office 2003 and other goodies on it. Ran sysprep
on it plain (did not provide sysprep.inf file). Ran Ghost and uploaded
image to the server. During the mini-setup it would ask for the
product key which is on the bottom of the laptop. Upon first login,
you have to activate over the Internet which is a breeze. There were
about 10 student laptops and it worked on all 10.

Most setups are like this:

1 Windows based computer

1 share on above computer

1 bootdisk to connect to above computer

So you connect to the Windows based computer's share through DOS. You
then run the DOS version of Ghost from this share and viola, you can
now take a snapshot and push it to server. Now you can pull it down ad
infinitum.

Slicker method that I sometimes use: Ghost32 on BartPE. I can actually
pull down am image to a machine and use remote desktop to my machine to
check my e-mail. I actually get giddy about that. I know I have a
problem.

Adam