John Bartow
john at winhaven.net
Mon Feb 13 18:13:08 CST 2006
Steve, Sorry, I missed this completely. The biggest difference between cloning and ghosting is that you're typically using ghosting as a safety measure of to quickly load various configurations on testing machines (well - at least I am). When you're cloning you're mass installing on new machines. You're often not going to get the luxury of doing all of that prep work on a dying machine because when the HD dies (or is dying) you probably don't want to rely on prepping and ghosting it at that point. Even so I think you would agree that it is much faster to ghost and use the repair method as you did to recover the OS and apps than it is to reinstall it all from scratch. I have heard of another way to do this that involved deleting the WinXP product installation key but I can't find it now. Anyway it basically just prompted you for the new ID# and you continue on as before. Maybe it was some hack that got taken down but its worth googling around for. -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 3:45 PM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Windows XP repair on a Ghosted drive Answered my own question, more or less. After re-installing Windows through the Repair option on the Windows XP CD and re-installing all 39 of the blankety blank XP updates, I found something in the "Windows XP Cookbook" by Allen and Gralla. The "recipe" involved cloning a Windows system. I'm sure that anyone here that manages an s-load of identical workstations in a big company knows about this. From "Windows XP Cookbook:" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Use SYSPREP to accomplish this. First, configure and arrange the initial machine as you like it, using the local administrator account. Then: Create a new local administrator. See Chapter 15 for instructions on creating local users. Log out of the local administrator account and log in to the new account you created. Navigate to the System applet inside Control Panel. Under the Advanced tab, click the User Profiles button. Select the one called Administrator that has the local machine's name in it, and click Copy To. Click Change in the Permitted to Use section. Select Everyone in the list. This gives permission for anybody logged into the computer to use the contents of the profile. Click OK. Click OK to get out of the Copy To dialog box. Finally, copy the contents of the Documents and Settings\Administrator folder to Documents and Settings\Default Users. Ensure that you are displaying hidden files and folders so that you copy all configuration files. Now, run SYSPREP with the following command: > sysprep -reseal -quiet -mini -pnp SYSPREP will strip the SIDs off the system, scrub any personal identifying information from the image, and then shut down the machine. From that point, use a drive copying utility to move the images to multiple machines. Once the copy is complete, reboot the computer without the floppy and proceed through mini-Setup again, so that all personal information can be restored and new SIDs can be generated. Do this on the cloned computers and the original "prototype" computer. Discussion Products like Symantec Ghost are often the quickest way to lay down an image of a drive onto multiple systems at once. The downside is that by taking what amounts to a photograph of a machine, any security identifiers (SIDs) that are stored on the machine are replicated in that image to other machines. The result would be multiple machines with identical SIDs, which can cause a lot of problems on your network. Ghost and DriveImage have SID generators built in, but Microsoft doesn't support that. The company wants you to use SYSPREP instead, which scrubs SIDs from an image in a supported fashion so that you can clone a machine easily. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I'm not sure that the ailing hard disk on that system would have survived long enough (it's pretty much toast now), but I'm glad to know how to get Windows working properly on a cloned drive. Steve Erbach Neenah, WI On 2/8/06, Steve Erbach <erbachs at gmail.com> wrote: > Dear Group, > > I'm just checking up to make sure my conceptions about how to do this > are in the ballpark. > > My wife's PC has two 160 GB drives, each one divided into two > partitions. We use Norton Ghost to backup the main 160 GB drive to > the additional drive. Windows sees the drives as C and D on the main > device, and E and F on the additional drive. _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com