XP w/SP2 sysprep CD image

[efrancisco]

I've been creating Windows 2000 images on cd for my company for a year
and half. We are now finally getting to XP and I'm having issues with
the size. It would appear the base image, before I've added drivers
and any other apps or scripts is 699MB. My sysprep package is atleast
150MB and another 100MBs for apps ascripts, so I know this will put my
image over the 700MB limit of cds. I'm wondering anyone else is
deploying images via cd still and if so how many cds they are using.

I'm using ghost 8.2 corp version to create the image and I'm using an
unattended script to build the initial base.

We're currently not using RIS because we don't have the infrastructure
for all our remote sites.

 

[JP Breton]

Can you put the image on a network share?

 

[Raven096]

Unfortuantely not, otherwise we'd do RIS images. We have over 480
different locations up and down the west coast and our bandwidth issues
already prevent us from placing images on to local 'servers' at those
locations.

 

[Michael Niehaus [MS]]

Typical XP images tend to range from 700MB to 2+GB, depending on the apps
you include. (2 CDs is pretty typical, although 3 is becoming more common.)
Ghost handles segmenting these into chunks pretty well and will prompt for
the next CD when it needs it.

-Michael Niehaus
Senior Consultant
MCS US Centers of Excellence - Deployment AOS
(e-mail address removed)
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Raven096]

That's what I was afraid of. The bigger problem to all of that is the
simple fact that after I'm done making the original deployable image
its probably only by 850MB - 900MB which means we'll be wasting alot of
cds.

 

[Bob]

On my project, we fitted dvd/cd drives to all the computers - we burn
bootable Ghost DVDs which gives us 4.6 GB to house a SYSPREPed image. We
used to span the image over three CDs, but now we use just one disk.

We used

 

[Guest]

You can try command line switch "-z9" (maximal compression - higger then in
interractive mode) for ghost.exe. Second way is remove files C:\hiberfil.sys
and
C:\pagefile.sys from image (or from hdd before image creation start)


(e-mail address removed) píše:

 

[Raven096]

I've made that suggestion some time ago, the problem is we have 9000+
pcs to upgrade with dvd drives, plus the cost of labor. Needless to
say, no one went for the idea and now wer're paying for it...

 

[Linda Peterson]

Over the last year I have started using hard drives to store image files on,
and it has been working out great to bring to a user's desk for a quick
re-image or upgrade. (Hard disk fat32 and boot from diskette) I unplug
their cd rom and plug in the secondary hard drive, run ghost from the
diskette. Works well for our images that take over 3 gb and often take less
than 12 minutes. (We also have images on the network, but just takes too
long over net)

 

[Mats]

If you got usb2 ports on your PC:s, One alternative is to use a WinPe CD to
boot from and an USB harddrive to store the image on. USB2 drives are really
fast to install from

 

[Raven096]

These are all nice ideas, but they don't work well for us. We have
480+ store locations and various offices up and down the west coast.
Its just not possible to have a tech for every location, nor is it
possible for a tech to visit that many locations in a day, obvious they
work in districts. So we have the images on CD so our helpdesk can
walk the store individual thru the gold disk process and be up and
running within an hour or so, otherwise it could be a few days before a
tech is out to the one location. With this in mind, we haven't gone
the route of network based images of any kind simply because most of
the people are not computer savy enough use a network boot disk of any
kind. Also, network bandwidth is a concern ontop of the age of the
machines will not support some of these options. So right now we are
still in CD mode, hopefully soon we'll change this.

 

[Mats]

We got the same kind of situation with about 3-400 offices spread over the
contry. Our helpdesk has been able to tech users how to use PXE/RIS.

You say that your users can insert a cd and restart their pc:s.
If you got usb connectors i think you could learn them howto plug in a
drive. If you use a 2.5" usb hard drive there is no need for a power supply
either.

If you can do this you can make a pe cd wich the will boot from as they are
used to. The difffrence is that the pe disc will install the image from the
drive instead of from the disc.