Making bootable window restore discs

[Astray]

Where I work I reformat and reinstall programs alot, we have about 20-30 programs which get installed, depending on what department the employee is in.

Right now I do this all manually, with just a Windows XP disc in hand...

I would like to make this easier, where I could make a disc of the ready-to-use setup for each department.

I read the earlier post about using sysprep, which I could use since some of the computers contain different hardware, but are mostly the same.

But what would I use to create the actual image of the drive? I tried norton ghost but it doesn't seem to work with what we have (lots of errors). I want it to be bootable too, so we only need 1 cd/dvd to install everything.

 

[Slowlearner]

Yes I would like some help with creating a Repair CD or DVD. There are tons tons of webpages covering slipstreaming SP2 but nothing really on creating a CD rescue set/DVD repair disk when all current XP cds available have SP2.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Astray
Where I work I reformat and reinstall programs alot, we have about 20-30 programs which get installed, depending on what department the employee is in.

Right now I do this all manually, with just a Windows XP disc in hand...

I would like to make this easier, where I could make a disc of the ready-to-use setup for each department.

I read the earlier post about using sysprep, which I could use since some of the computers contain different hardware, but are mostly the same.

But what would I use to create the actual image of the drive? I tried norton ghost but it doesn't seem to work with what we have (lots of errors). I want it to be bootable too, so we only need 1 cd/dvd to install everything.

Ghost/Sysprep is a good solution and is much easier than most of the alternatives. What are the exact errors you get?

Some other ideas:
1. MSFN.ORG has lots of ideas for how to do bootable CDs with all your software on it, but it's fairly difficult compared with Ghost and Sysprep.
2. Active Directory can shoot out most applications fairly easily nowadays.
3. SMS does a great job, but depends on the application to install itself (ie you'd need to package the app or depend on MSIs)

Ghost + Sysprep is probably the best place to start.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Slowlearner
Yes I would like some help with creating a Repair CD or DVD. There are tons tons of webpages covering slipstreaming SP2 but nothing really on creating a CD rescue set/DVD repair disk when all current XP cds available have SP2.

Do you want a *repair disk* or do you want an *install disk* like the OP? If you want just a repair CD, just get Bart's PE Boot CD and put stuff on it.

 

[Slowlearner]

Heres what I would like - I have the system built and running stable for a long time but I know the HD will stutter/hiccup/die sometime and I will have to reload everything. Right now what I have done is taken an older HD and cloned the main HD using ghost. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to burn a set of cds or dvds to do the same thing, specially now that we have 160 GB+ hard drives.

At work I have started to burn a dvd for all new pcs after I have them all set up and running the way we want them to - but I have not able make that dvd bootable, that way in case of hd failure all that I need to do is stick in a new hd and boot off the cd/dvd to re-install.

 

[dclive]

I'd stick with ghosting to a hard drive into a set of .GHO ghost files.

At work I'd store it on a server somewhere, and use Bart's PE Boot CD with Ghost to put the files back onto the machines.

 

[Jojo1971]

NLITE is what you need....

 

[dclive]

Getting nLite working so that it will successfully install a dozen or so programs is a lot of work compared to simply using Sysprep + Ghost. One requires light programming/scripting, whereas the other just requires 15 minutes work with Sysprep and a few minutes work with Ghost.

 

[Slowlearner]

Okay so I decided to spend a couple of hours on this, and created a BartPE as well as UBCD4win disks and played around with them. The first problem was that the network drivers would'nt load. Secondly while both disks can see all the hard drives and read them etc but then what - how do I restore? I still have to dig out my mb drivers CD (and I actually have much newer nvidia and ati drivers loaded). Forgive me, I may be mistaken but cant I do that with a Knoppix live cd. What really surprises me is that all Linux live CDs load comfortably on most pcs and we have yet to see something remotely similar to that in the Windows world.

Incidentally, I plan to assemble a set of software tools, and I specially liked ERD commander - I may have read the eula wrong but it appeared that you need to have this 100$ software installed on each pc that you may or may not need to restore sometime in the future. Is that true of Acronis and other recommended tools.

Why is life so difficult?

 

[dclive]

You need to add the network drivers. It's shockingly simple in Bart's PE environment - just read the docs - you literally put an .inf and a .sys file into the right directory; I think that's literally it (you might need to modify a textfile too - it's *very* easy).

RE: How do you restore - well, you put Ghost8 (Win32 edition) on your network share, you map a drive to that network share from within bartpe, and then you run Ghost. You then ghost your drive to the network share. Then if anything bad ever happens, do those same steps, but do a restore. Very straightforward.

Life isn't difficult; I've built Bart's PE discs quite a bit - it's wonderful.