Chalky Top Gun

We have. We each have a 128 Mb Dell USB Key and it is bootable on the GX-280, in fact it boots on any computer that supports USB booting. Here is a guide I found for you - I hope you have a good grasping of DOS and partitioning and fdisk-ing a hard disk because it is about the same. http://www.aaltonen.us/archive/2004/03/01/...b-key-addendum/ Obviously once the USB key is prep-ed as in the above example you copy all the Barts network bootdisk files and folders to the key. Then you can also put the ghost executable on etc.... CD's and the USB key are actually about the same speed boot-wise, but you can run back and forth to get a file etc... back onto the USB key without using a new CD for instance a network card driver for windows.... just as an example. We find them incredibly useful for our mass-ghosting tasks that we do. I hope this helps you out.

For that we had to find the driver ourselves. You see, with the Network Boot CD that we use it already comes with a small set of drivers for some popular NICs, but of course later you have to add more to it. And yes, specifically the Broadcom 1 Gb 57xx controller, one of our guys got the driver, integrated into the CD so we could start ghosting our new Dell GX-280's. As for the bootable CD, I would recommend a USB Key, but either way, you are using a boot floppy image and puttiing it onto a bootable medium, so we also have simply used the small 8 cm mini-CDs and used Nero to use the 1.44 Mb Floppy disk as a bootable disk image, easy enough actually. Anything is better than waiting for a flopy the first few times you are familiarizing yourself with this ghosting system. As for the second nics (I cannot imaging why you would install a 100 Mb secondary nic anyway) you will still need different NDIS drivers for the intel pro cards (I think.... Barts Disk includes a driver for them, you can always specificially try his boot disk and see) but you only need one NIC enabled to do the whole ghost thing and if you can have Gb switches and servers too like we do then you have awesome imaging speed.

Hey there. We have a solution at work using Barts Network Boot Disk and Ghost 8.0 Corporate - on a USB Key that we boot from. That connects to a shared folder on a server and the .GHO image gets pulled, takes like 5 minutes on 100Mb. Basically, we are in the same boat as you, we use Dell machines, and have two different sets of users to prep for. The imaging works perfect, all you do in the beginning is name your first machine (with all the updates and programs and a million configuration settings you always need to make) something like Setup or Config, whatever, you can see it in DNS, join it to the domain, give it an IP or DHCP and then that becomes your base image. Forget SysPrep or anything else, Ghost 8/9 will do the job for you just fine, you just need Barts network boot disk, although with that, finding the right DOS NDIS drivers can be a task. You might also have to manually re-CAB them, something we do ourselves. Then one -by one, just rename & Re-IP each machine as you go and Bob's your uncle. (British saying). There. If you need any more specific info, PM me.