Question : Booting into a Ghostcast multicast session on a machine without a flopply drive.

We are getting over 50 new workstations that will be running Windows XP Professional and do not have floppy drives. We have the new Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition 1.0 (2003)

I have heard in this new version there are more straightfoward ways of doing diskless boot, but have been unable to determine how to do so thus far.

Any advice/experience would be appreciated.

Answer : Booting into a Ghostcast multicast session on a machine without a flopply drive.

Hello again

Now this will be a long post and i will start with creating the image for use part and hopefully i dont miss anything or make it to hard but here goes :-)

Ok well im guessing that so far you understand the basic standalone ghost concept so i wont cover that to much, but to begin with get your source machine ready (The one you will image from). When completed you need to install the ghost console client. This can be done in 2 ways, either installed the client using the ghost installation media either on cd or via  a network share or throught the ghost console program under the tools menu i think and then remote client install. If you install with the remote client install it will ask you for the machine name and security information (Bearing in mind that remote client installs are only availble on WinNT/2k/xp systems), if not install the client from the installation media and when asked for the server to connect to you can either leave it blank and it will find the first available or specify the server name.

At this point you installed the client software on your source machine. If you open the ghost console software and look at the machine groups list and expand it till you see Default on the right will appear the machine you have just installed your ghost client on ! This is the basis of how machines are controlled by ghost corporate. Any machine you register with the console will appear here to begin with. You can make folders to organise all your machines as you see fit, this will become almost mandatory when you start to manage alot of machines.

Now that the client is installed look further down the list and you will see something called configuration resources, under that will be Images, click on it. On the right will be a list of all known ghost images (blank at the moment). These are just shortcuts to the actual files. So what we need to do is to tell ghost where to put your image, so right click on the right and say new image, name it appropriately and tell it where you want to store it.

At this point we are ready to pull the image from the machine to the server. Above configuration resources on the left you will see tasks, click it. Tasks are the CORE of ghost console. Whenever you want to do anything to a machine you execute a task. So we need to make a task to pull the image from the machine. Right click on the right hand side and in this case say new image create task. You can either execute immedaite or create the task, execute immediate doesnt save the task and it will not be reusable where as just creating the task means it can be reused again (kind of like saving a shortcut). Next you tell ghost the machine to use, the image to use and if applicable compression and removing the client from the domain (If you are planning to make clients auto join your domain when they are ghosted you MUST disjoin the machine from the domain before taking the image) and clck ok to save or execute immediate. If you didnt execute immediate you will the task you made, to start it right click it and click execute.

At this point the source machine will auto reboot into ghost and suck an image up to the server and then return to windows.

Well it was pretty long huh to explain anyway, once you understand the procedures its very easy and manageable to suck images up and push them out. So once you have got this bit let me know and ill cover pushing the image out to clients.