DescentBB

Krom reminded me of this, and I want to investigate the practicality of using Ghost for my machines.

I havn't seen or used Ghost for a long time. Since it was DOS-only. So I know nothing about it's current manifestation.

My scenario is: I have nine machines here in my network. I'm getting ready for a complete and absolute overhaul. Every drive in every machine is getting wiped and new OS's all around. Since I get anything I want free from MS, I'm going to take advantage of it. (10cpu 2k and xp licenses are nice!)
Once I have them all loaded, I want a snapshot of all of them. But storing the images is my main question...can I take a 250gb drive, and put images for nine machines? Eight actually, I doubt I can Ghost a 100gb game box installation. Or maybe I can, dunno. But with or without the game box, is this possible, where I can put the images and Ghost client on the hard drive, and a bootable cd (Or a bootable drive, and slave the box's drive for the restore), and restore them at will?
Could I even DVD the smaller machines? The servers are only going to have 20gb drives, probably not even half full.
Lastly, what version of Ghost is the preferred?

tia

Not sure about Ghost, but I use Powerquest Drive Image and you can put the image on a network drive, CD, or other drive in the PC. Then use the DI CD to boot up, and point it to the image.

I'm trying Acronis True Image at work right now. It should be finished creating the image by tomorrow and then I need to copy it to a fresh hd. I'll let you know how it goes.

Drive Image 7 -- very nice, no need for DOS or safe mode. Runs of the windoze desktop.

Edit: forgot -- you can browse the image too, nice if you want some files back.

Acronis is also another program I've used, but only once.

Can anyone give me a ratio of drive to image with whatever package you described? What does a 20G with 10G, or something, on it end up being size-wize?

Stress, do you use an imager?

DI7 only stores info that's there plus it does some compression. So 10GB data ends up becomming a < 10 GB image file (independent from the HDD size)

Drive image will only do what space you are using, then low compression will do good.

I have a 5.5 Gig C drive that I image and it becomes 840 Megs.

I recently experimented with Ghost trying to do a USB HD image. I found the program to be completely and utterly full of sh_____t, at least in USB 1 and USB2 modes.

USB 1 veeeeeeeery slow
USB 2 non functional