On 5/31/06, David Alanis <SDALAN04 at smumn.edu> wrote: > My project is to setup a ghosting server/PC manager to quickly image and install PC's. However, there is no two computers alike at one given point to image. ... ok here is my question :P what recommendations can I get regarding the cloning of Window computers without the hassle of using a third party crap? I'm not sure if I entirely understand the question, but I've done a fair amount of work with cloning windows boxes at work, so here's my best shot... First off, Ghost corporate seems to truly be the best option for cloning computers. I've tried many other options (including G4L and G4U) and nothing else works as well, as fast, and on as many computers. It also easily handles cloning onto different sized hard drives, so long as the target drive is at least as large as the amount of used space on the original hard drive. As for no two computers being completely alike, are there large groups of computers that are relatively similar? If so, you can probably do what my company does, and use Microsoft's sysprep tool before making a ghost image of the original computer. sysprep has an option to rescan for hardware changes, so if something minor changes, like the size of the hard drive/RAM or speed of processor, or most plug and play PCI cards, windows SHOULD detect that change upon it's first boot, and take that in stride. Also, if running XP on the computer, it is best to clone before activating the computer, and if has NOT been activated, do NOT reset the timer in sysprep. You're only allowed to do that so many times before it tells you it can't do it any more. That can be a real PITA. To add a little bit of on-topic discussion...due to the volume of computers that my company has been cloning recently, we decided that we needed to have half a dozen ghost servers available at any moment, all with access to the same images, so I set up a rack of older server computers running 2000 server with the ghost server program on them and running terminal services. I set up a Ubuntu box with a 3TB SCSI RAID connected to it to hold all of our images, and used samba to share all the images with the ghost servers over gig-e. Using this setup, I can fire off a ghost process from my desk by using rdesktop to control one of the ghost servers. You could, of course, comply with the mandate of sticking with Microsoft OSes and still get the job done, but my co-workers and I felt that Linux provided a more elegant solution to our particular problem. I hope that's helpful. - Justin