My base, YWAM Madison, just received a donation of about 20 dells. They are all P4s so this is going to be a significant upgrade for us.
I am exploring and look for a simple way of do some kind of ghosting or disk image install of windows and our standard setup (from one complete install). Any suggestions? A friend recommended Norton Ghost, but are there any open (i.e. free) apps out there?
Thanks?
Comments
Norton Ghost works well
We have been using an older version (about 3.5 years now) of Norton Ghost and it has worked well for us with eight identical workstations. Because we can get educational pricing on it as well it wasn't very expensive for the time and effort that it has saved us over the years.
Bill
Re: norton ghost
Here was my dream: download the images onto a server, set up all the machines with a boot disk and install the images from that remote server. Apparently Norton Ghost 2003 (the consumer edition) won't let you do that, but Symantec Ghost (the corporate edition) does. Of course we got hold of a copy of Norton Ghost 2003. In the end I created a USB boot-disk, writing the image to that disk. I'll use the boot-disk on the new machines, and simply install the images.
It will take a bit more time.. But I think it'll work!
Norton Ghost
I've also used Norton Gost. It works really well... I remember using it for the UofN conference in Brazil in 2005. We set up 15 machines in 24hrs. I have not used any other similar tool so I can't make any comparissons but I recomend Norton Ghost.
Norton Ghost vs. Acronis True Image
Here is an interesting (although slightly date (2005)) review of Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image.
ZD Net: Mirror your hard drive: two disk-copying utilities reviewed
Acronis True Image comes out the leader in this one. They even offer an Enterprise version that does both Linux and Windows Servers (albeit at a $999.00 price tag).