Pulling down a ghost image...

[ManikMike69]

It works in theory. I finished building and imaging the first machine yesterday, no real problems. Then I tried to pull down the same image onto a second machine, as we're gonna be putting about 8 of these out. The Ghost boot files are on a USB stick, and all the files work fine, since I used exactly that stick with those files to ghost the image up to the server in the first place.

The BIOS settings have been fixed so that the machine boots (or tries to boot) off the stick. And everything works fine til about 9 seconds after the Windows 98 window (with the shiny thing at the bottom) turns up. At the 8th or 9th second, though, everything crashes, never to move again. Anyone got any ideas?

The machine is a Dell SX, straight out of the box, with a factory image of WinXP. In theory this just shouldn't be happening. Yet there it is. Damn thing.

 

[Nodsu]

I trust the machines are identical..

Did you ghost the disk or the partition originally?

BTW if you are cloning several machines then you might be interested in programs called udpcast and g4u. Udpcast will broadcast the source machine disk image over the network to any number of receivers simultaneously. g4u will upload a disk image to an ftp server and then you can use it to download the image to any targets.

Both utilities work with raw disk images so there will be no partition issues. Also, they are Linux and BSD based so there is no need to set up drivers like with Ghost.

Not to mention that it is Free Software

 

[ManikMike69]

I trust the machines are identical..

Did you ghost the disk or the partition originally?

Yeah, I ghosted the disk. And the machines are absolutely identical. You know the sort of thing, mass-ordering for a new office...yadda yadda.

BTW if you are cloning several machines then you might be interested in programs called udpcast and g4u. Udpcast will broadcast the source machine disk image over the network to any number of receivers simultaneously. g4u will upload a disk image to an ftp server and then you can use it to download the image to any targets.

Both utilities work with raw disk images so there will be no partition issues. Also, they are Linux and BSD based so there is no need to set up drivers like with Ghost.

Not to mention that it is Free Software

Thanks, I'll look into that later. Just wish the damn Ghost would co-operate.

 

[Nodsu]

It just might be a broken computer. Try loading the image to another one.
Can you boot Windows in MSDOS or safe mode? You can tell it to create boot log and see from there where things go bad.

 

[ManikMike69]

Meh. Turns out it was a bad USB stick. So now I've got the right USB stick, and Ghost is loading, but when I pull down the image, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the machine. I must have done something wrong with the imaging.

 

[ManikMike69]

Yep, that was it. I wasn't paying sufficient attention to the screen and was dumping and pulling down the contents of the USB key, which explains why each key immediately became redundant. D'oh!