Norton Ghost is a very useful application created by Symantec, I personally don't find much use for the set of Windows utilities and applications, but the DOS application is very useful. You can use Norton Ghost to create disk/partition images, restore them and clone a disk/partition to another, which doesn't sound very good, but when you consider that you can do this over a network, then you will see the possibilities are endless, especially if you have hundreds of identical computers to install Windows on and configure. A rough guide to doing this is outlined below.

What you will need

• A floppy disk
• A computer to host ghost images and the ghost executable
• At least 16MB of RAM on the target computer

Tutorial

First of all, visit http://www.netbootdisk.com/cards.htm to check you have a compatible network card, if not, you will need to visit http://www.netbootdisk.com/adding.htm.You should then download the bootdisk from http://www.netbootdisk.com/download.htm, extract the archive, run makedisk.bat and follow all on-screen instructions.

Next thing to do is make a network share on a computer (we will call this computer SERVER, and the share IMG in this tutorial), this will be used to host the ghost image files, and the ghost executable. Put the Ghost executable ghost.exe in this share (can be downloaded here (Ghost 7.5): ghost.exe).

Now we have performed the initial preparation, we can boot the disk. Insert the floppy disk into the target computer, and boot off the floppy. The disk takes a while to load, as it extracts all the drivers etc. After a while, you will see a menu, which allows you to define settings such as Credentials, drivers to load, IP addresses etc - explore the menus and set as necessary. When the drivers and TSRs have loaded, you will be presented with a DOS prompt, first type PING SERVER to test whether we can communicate with \\SERVER . If it pings successfully, then type NET USE U: \\SERVER\IMG , then type U: , and finally, type GHOST.EXE . If you have used Ghost before, you now know what to to, if you haven't, take a look round, it's very easy to use, but remember to save all images etc to the U: drive.

Notes

• The bootdisk will not be able to connect to shares which are on a Windows Server 2003 computer. In order to connect to a Windows Server 2003 computer, you will have to disable the 'Digitally Sign Communications' group policy.
• If you don't have a spare Windows computer to host the images, you can always use a Linux box with SAMBA Server installed.
• You can automate connecting the network drive etc and even automate ghost (through switches) by editing the Logon script in .\NetBoot\FileCopy on the floppy.
• This is not the best method of ghosting multiple computers at once, ghost multicasting is much better and faster.

Images

Above (both pictures): Toshiba Libretto 110CT running ghost over a Xircom network card.