Tech Jargon – Ghost distaste

So we happen to have a ghost server in our office, ver. 7.5 to be exact. Now this was the old version I used back when I worked at DTC, but back then the system didn’t have any issues for us. There was one guy who would make all of the boot discs and CDs for us, so we never really had any issues. Well no one here is actually familiar with Ghost. In fact, I know more than most the people here. So I’ve been doing what I can with what little Ghost knowledge I actually have to get it to work.

For those of you who don’t know what Ghost is, it’s basically a full size, byte-for-byte backup of your harddrive. This software is primarly used for backups and mass installation of PCs. You can build a machine for a certain model, say the latest Dell laptop, and if you have 10 people who just got this same model in the company, you only have to build one of them, use Ghost to make a copy, and then put that image on the other machines. They suddenly have everything you want installed in about 30 minutes what would normally take 2-3 hours per machine. This can be done via drive-to-drive, which means having two hard drives in a machine and then copying from one to the other, or using what’s called a ghost server. A ghost server is more popular for the mass installation, as you can use it over a network and by merely putting in a session number, can shoot down the image to many PCs at one time, or you can upload the image onto the server from your PC, thus backing it up for later.

Well this is all fine and dandy, except two model desktops we have here at our office do not get along with Ghost at all. The Gateway 4300 and Gateway 4100 do not like Ghost and will not even load the GUI, even when I try to do a drive-to-drive. Now I’ve tinkered more with the 4300 than the other, but after 3 hours of playing I couldn’t get it to load up the ghost GUI at any point. Not even Google could help a brother out. It was an extremely frustrating situation.

I say to hell with Ghost. Their support isn’t all that spectacular on issues like this either. Use something more like Bart PE with DriveImage XML. This is a nice free-ware alternative to Ghost. If anyone has any suggestions to getting these model Gateways working I would appreciate it.

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One Response to Tech Jargon – Ghost distaste

  1. Brit Butler says:

    I recently imaged my Linux and Windows partitions with a tool called partimage and it worked brilliantly. It’s FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) but I don’t think there’s a Windows version (though it will do Windows partitions or whole drives, I think). Then again, Norton Ghost at TVS (think it was 7.5 too) was a LiveCD based on Suse Linux IIRC and partimage has a livecd floating around somewhere. There’s also this:

    http://www.clonezilla.org/
    http://ping.windowsdream.com/
    http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/free_imaging_software.html

    Maybe one of those will help. 🙂
    Feel like coming over soon?

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