Restore cd's HP and Compaq

[netman4ttm]

rcgreen,

Does that include that license key?

The Compaq's never ask for the key, but it is installed during the restore.

And does ghost work with 2k and xp?

Thanks

[rcgreen]

AFAIK, ghost clones the hard drive as is, and therefore,
assuming the OS was lawfully installed in the first place, the license
key was entered during installation, and is restored with the
ghost file without having to be keyed in again.

My COMPAQ came with a Norton Ghost restore disk.
If you screw up the OS, you just boot the restore
disk and everything is restored from an image file.
I did have to enter a license key for Microsoft Word,
but not for windows.

And I'd be sure that the latest edition of Ghost
could handle the latest Microsoft OS.

[paldie]

Ghost will work with 2K and xp I have done it. The best practice for this is to build the system using you legal licensed software. Once you have the installation correct use MS SYSPREP utility to have the software run through the mini-installation for Plug-n-pray. This will do an auto-discovery of devices on the system and do the basics. It will not ask you for the CD-key...Is will also allow for the SID to change on the system. The biggest thing you need to worry about here is BIOS. The HAL of W2K and (I imagine) XP is a little different depending on the BIOS of the system you are installing on. If the BIOS type is the same then you can get away with ghosting the image. If it is different you will need an image for every BIOS type. But if the hardware is the same (IE the same manufaturer and make and model) then it will work. You get into flakey territory when you have PC that are build by a tier three local vendor who costom builds machines, because the motherboard just might be different. IF they are all HP or Compaq you most likely can get away with one image per model...

There is a utility Symantec has call GhostWalker. It comes with Ghost Enterprise. It allows you to manually change the SID of a system. You need to boot the system with a boot disk and run ghost walker. which will search the hard drive for the SID of the system and the change it to an new one. I haave used this to clone W2K Servers. We took an inage of the original server which was in the AD domain. We imaged to the new box (hardware was indentical) we then restarted with a boot disk after restarting. we walked the SID to a new one. restarted off the network... changed the IP address and removed it from the domain putting it in a workgroup. rebooted attached to the network with its new ip address and moved the srever into the domain... it is a sweet process.. we did this with W2K Terminal Servers RUnning Citrix MetaFrame XP and it works....

sorry for rambling, I have just used Ghost extensively and it has saved tons of time. You can even script a networkable boot disk to start the machine, load the nic in dos, bind tcp/ip to the nic, assign an IP address, attach to a network and login, map a network drive, and load an image from that network drive, and do this atuomatically. all you have to do is insert the floppy disk and start the machine.... take some work to get it running and scrippted but once it is done...imaging system is simple.....