Cloning out machines without using a boot disk

[ineedmusic]

hello everyone, im new to the forum and was hopping to get some help with a cloning issue that ive had come up recently. i currently use nortons ghost 8.2 to clone out my computers at work, its good and works well but i constantly using boot disks is slowing me down and is becoming to much of a hassel for me since im getting more of demand to roll out more machines at once. so i was wondering is anyone here knows how to make computers boot into ghost off the network through some sort of dhcp process or wake-on lan process. basically im looking for a way to make computers boot into ghost automatically without me having to manually boot every machine one by one. any help on this will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nodsu]

How are the machines configured out of the box?

Usually "network" comes after the hard drive, so in case these machines have something on their disks, they will never boot from the net unless you go and fix the settings in BIOS. Meaning that you might as well boot the cloning software from a CD.

If you can get the machine to do PXE boot, then you can use this excellent free disk cloning program called UDPcast. You can even use it with local boot - the thing is designed to broadcast the disk image to multiple targets simultaneously and you could pretty much deploy thousands of machines in one go

 

[ineedmusic]

they are dell machines with os and default dell applications. typically dell ships their machines with everything set to boot. is there a way to configure nortons to boot them by pxe boot because everything i keep reading says 8.2 doesnt support pxe boot.

 

[Nodsu]

You can boot any floppy image over PXE. So if you have a proper Ghost floppy, you can boot it over PXE.