About a month ago I was given 65 new Dell Optiplex 745’s to replace my 6 year old desktops in my training environment. This presented a multitude of problems for me.
Problems:
- Our imaging software ran off of a floppy disk.
- It was DOS based, and I hate DOS
- It couldn’t detect SATA drives (you would not believe how mad I was when I finally solved the floppy problem just to run into this).
As usual, I’m dumped into this with no support of note and a limited time frame. Not to mention all of my normal duties. So what do I do? The same thing I do whenever I have an insurmountable obstacle… Turn to Linux.
Ghost 4 Linux is a CD based distro designed with imaging in mind. It’s really useful and all that, blah blah blah. This post isn’t about extolling its many virtues. This post is to teach you how to use it. More accurately, this post is to teach my coworkers at our other sites to replicate my setup. I’ve included below the document I sent to them so they could get up and running with Windows 2003 servers.
Enjoy.
Ghost 4 Linux instructions
Ghost 4 Linux is natively a CD based distribution; however it can be easily modified to run from a network boot. These instructions assume you are using a Windows 2003 Server for DHCP.
Continue reading Ghost 4 Linux complete guide to imaging