Ghost Image of XP Pro unattended installation.

[Twisterfreak]

Hi guys i am new here. One of the guys at work has a problem and i thought i'd post it here to the experts to see what you had to say on the matter. Not being an expert myself, i'll just post the details of what this guy is trying to acheive.

OK. He wants to create a bootable DVD with XP Pro, SP2 + current updates,Office XP, Mcafee AV, Acrobat, Spywareblaster, Microsoft Antispyware.

But he wants the disk to contain a ghost image of this installation so it can be installed onto multiple machines. The idea would be that the disk would automatically ghost the image on to the new drive deleting the previous image of XP Home.

No other disks would be needed.

I work for a company that provide PC's for the National Health Service(UK) so the XP disks we use has a special key, as does Office XP, and the other software is free.

Because of the limitations of XPHome we have to put on XPPro. Unfortunately all the new computers arrive with Home.

So thanks if you understood that. So basically a single DVD disk for each engineer to carry with him, which when put into the machine, and booted from, would ghost this standard image onto the hard drive.

We use the same PC's so compatibility isnt a problem.

Can it be done guys?

Great thanks for your patience and help if it is available.

Darren

[sheiksoft]

try nero 6 and try to copy all the files to one ghost image on ur hard disk and burn it on a dvd.

regards sheik...

[Twisterfreak]

Thanks Sheik. Would this enable ghost to be installed with the xp image? What i think they don't want is to have to boot to ghost, then have to select source/destination etc.

They want to boot straight to the DVD, ghost would autorun and automatically image onto the harddrive.

Thanks

Darren

[BrandonS_Mil]

You are in luck my friend...

I work for the Army, and in my unit i am the SR. Computer Repair tech. We wanted a solution to help with this exact issue.

SO.....

1. Make a Boot disk from Ghost... , then

2. Use WinImage and make a bootable image file, or use Nero/Roxio to make your bootable sector copying from the boot floppy.

3. Copy your ghost file to the project and tweak you ghost settings per the manual and your good to go.

[ukg1jzj]

hi,

not clear if the pc's are going into a domain.. if they are, then remember to run sysprep before creating the ghostimage.. that would clear the SID in the image and avoid conflicts on the network.. also run 'ipconfig /release' before shutting down prior to ghost image is created..

Rgds

JV.