On Tuesday 12 August 2003 21:30, Paul Tansom wrote:
That's an interesting thought that hadn't crossed my mind. I'll have to read up on it a bit, but that should take care of NTFS. Of course the problem with any of these is where to put the resultant image so it can be accessed and how to spool it straight there in the absence of local disk space.
Ghost can do that, it's the only way I have ever used it. You can have one machine running the Windows ghost software in listen mode (sorry can't remember what they actually call it) and then providing you can find a dos driver for your network card, the ghost boot disk can connect to the remote machine and stream images to/from it.
The way to get around the Dos driver problem is to keep a couple of really generic PCI and PCMCIA cards with the ghost disks in case you come across say a laptop with intergrated ethernet that has no Dos drivers.
I am totally confused about the Ghost licensing, but I suggest you review it as the way I understood it, If you booted machines from the Ghost boot disk then you only need licenses for as many machines as you want booted at the same time (plus whatever machine you are going to stream the image to) Installing the WIndows software is another matter, but why would you want to do that on more than one machine ?
I have also used PQ Disk Image, which I like quite a bit. As far as I can remember it can copy an image even if it doesn't understand it (although resize to fit won't work) Certainly I have moved ext2 and (I think) reiser images around with it. You can also buy it with Partition Magic. Both have the facility for creating boot floppy's.
One thing I prefer about Ghost however is that you can inspect/change the contents of an image without having to restore it somewhere first. They may have done that with PQDI now as it's been a while since I have used either.