Ghosting

Anyone familliar with ghosting?

i have heard about this at my college, every computer, gets ghosted with this mini image or somthing from a server, that makes all the applications and settings of the operating system that its getting ghosted from appear on all computers, i would like to ghost my old computer with a image of my main computers os, so when i launch windows on my old computer, everything is exatly the same as on my main computer, same amount of icons on the desktop, same apps, same theme, but all over network, so it is not installed on the actual old computer, all that would be installed on the old computer, would be a fresh copy of windows xp.

sorry if you find it hard to understand, i am finding it hard to explain.

can anyone help?

 

i Know what you mean, i have a ghost image of my HDD when i got this computer for the first time, if it goes horribly wrong then i can find a program and load the ghost image up.
When i was at the computer shop a couple of years back (helping occasionally) they used norton ghost on all the computers that went out, that way they had an image of the HDD when the computer was first built.
What it does is make a complete image of your HDD and then if you upgrade or need a backup you can load the backup and have your computer back to the way it was when the ghost was created.
This should help as well.

 

so, it makes a compleate image of the hard drive, then loads it onto the other computer?

but, my old ocmputer only has 20gb capacity, is the image only like 400mb (shortcuts and stuff)

i dont want ot make a backup, i want to load my os and everything on it onto my old computer, but not taking up the amount of space.

 

no it actually makes an image of EVERYTHING meaning registry, program files, windows folders, settings, absolutely everything...

 

Ghoasting

so that wud be like 160gb?

 

if you've got 160GB of stuff then yes i would think so

 

Ghoasting

, so hwo to the college do it?
they dont use the hard drive in the computer, all stuff/programs and everyhitng are loaded onto the computer on startup.

 

i'm not sure, maybe they use a different system someone else may know...

 

Ghoasting

By ghosting the hard drive, you make a large archive of the exact data on it. However, this is different to what most schools/colleges would do. College computers normally boot from a network, loading the OS and all apps from a server so all computers have the same settings. Hence the reason you canuse any one of them and still have your documents.

Also ghosting only works when you have the same/similar hardware configs, as the image also contains driver settings aswell.

 

Ghoasting

I used ghosting while on my work experience, we used Norton ghost and when you are ghosting a little ghost comes up lol. Its cool because you can replicate systems in a fraction the time it would normally take you to do it but you do need systems with similar hardware.

 

Ghoasting

hmmm, so how do i boot from network?

 

Ghoasting

Well you boot onto the ghosting prgram disc. Use that to connect to the network and find the ghost image you want and just press enter. Least thats what I did

 

Ghoasting

ok, i dont understand that, i need some more details instructions.

 

Ghoasting

Sorry mate I dont remember in detail how to do it. Ill see if i can get some instructions

 

Ghoasting

When I say boot from network, i meant the entire OS (not the image archive) can be booted from a network location. This way you can boot without a disk drive.

 

Ghoasting

Thats not what I did because we specifically had a silver imatation disc says GHOST I remember it vividly yet I dont know why

 

Ghoasting

what i want to do, is first, try to boot windows xp on my main computer, but so it boots form my old computer, so i am practically using the old computers os and everyhting, but i dont know hwo to do that, when i put first boot device to lan, nothing happens.

 

maybe thats because you havent set it to boot from anything on lan, it might need a specific location of where the OS is.

 

and how do i do that?

 

i dont know it was just a thought, i might be wrong