Ghost Solution Suite 3 offers an excellent toolbox to the imaging administrator. It is clearly designed to allow central management of imaging operations, but there will be times when addressing the needs of a specific department or device will necessitate using a different function of the technology, such as when the use of the network is not possible, or not desirable. Many organizations may have network usage restrictions, or may have a machine that is for some reason "air-gapped" from the network. This article will show you how to use Ghost Solution Suite 3 to handle these situations.
Prerequisites:
You will need a method to boot the client machine(s) into a Pre-OS environment. I recommend these steps for creating boot media. These instructions assume that you have boot media created with those instructions. This method also requires a USB-connected storage drive.
To Create an Image
1. Connect your storage device to the machine you wish to image via USB.
2. Boot the machine with a stand-alone boot disk with Ghost (see Prerequisite, above).
3. Ghost will launch. If it does not launch, at the command prompt type Ghost64.exe and press Enter (if your boot disk is 32bit, type Ghost32.exe instead). Ghost will launch.
4. In Ghost, choose Local > Disk > To Image.
5. It will ask for the source drive, and you will typically be choosing Drive 1. Please ignore 'Drive 80 - OS VOLUMES'. Also note that your USB drive will show up on the list. If there is any confusion, check the 'Size(MB)' column to verify it based on size.
6. Make sure you select the USB storage drive in the 'Look in:' dropdown menu at the top, then specify a filename for the image file.
7. Select the compression level. We recommend using 'Fast' compression.
8. Proceed with image creation.
To Deploy An Image
1. Boot the machine with a stand-alone boot disk with Ghost (see Prerequisite, above).
2. If your boot disk automatically launches Ghost, close Ghost. You will have a command prompt.
3. Ghost will launch. If it does not launch, at the command prompt type Ghost32.exe or Ghost64.exe and press Enter. Ghost will launch.
4. In Ghost, choose Local > Disk > From Image.
5. It will ask for the source image. The source image will be the USB drive; WinPE will assign it a drive letter. Select the appropriate *.GHO file from that location.
6. Select the destination drive to which you wish to deploy. Note that the drive that is the source for the image is in red text and cannot be selected.
7. Proceed with image restore.