Cloning a room full of computers
It takes a long time to set up a Windows PC correctly and install all the required programs; imagine the effort involved if you have to set up twenty machines in a training room and have several schools to do! Fortunately there is an easy way providing that your computers are identical, or nearly identical. After setting up one computer to perfection, you make a compressed image of its hard drive using a program called Norton Ghost (or the equivalent Drive Image by Power Quest) and then copy that image to the hard drive of all the other PCs, one by one. It may take you four or five hours to set up the "master", but each of the "clones" takes only five or ten minutes. Not only do you save a vast amount of time, you also ensure that all your computers look and behave identically, something which is essential in a teaching environment.
So, the first job is to set up your master PC to the best of your ability. Read the notes on Setting up a Windows PC for guidelines. Make sure you have run Regclean and Scandisk, cleared the documents menu, emptied the Recycle Bin and run Disk Defragmenter. If you are a perfectionist you might also want to run the Find function in the Help of every program to build up its Help database too. Remember, anything you do wrong here will be carried over to every other PC.
When you have finished, prepare a Startup disk with just the minimum files on it and copy the ghost.exe program to it. Reboot your PC from the floppy and then run Ghost from the DOS prompt. Although it has a GUI, you can only use the keyboard unless you load DOS mouse drivers from the boot disk - not really necessary.
The
menu is a little confusing at first, but if you remember that you are creating
an image of the primary partition (the one with Windows and all the software
on) and saving it to the secondary partition, then you won't go wrong. Give
the image file a name such as <win95pri> and select Fast compression.
Set the ghosting process running and sit back for a few minutes. Depending
on your processor and hard drive speed it will take around ten minutes to
create the image. When it has finished you will be offered the chance to run
an integrity check on the image - do so. Assuming the check passes you can
exit the program and reboot.
The ghost image of a typical Win95 + Office 97 installation is approximately 250 MB in size. Having created the image on the master, you use it to clone the other PCs in your work group and make them identical. As usual, there is a problem... how do you make the ghost image accessible to computers which are not networked or may not even have an OS installed yet? There are several possibilities, all of which have their disadvantages.
(1) A method favoured by many is to copy the ghost image to a spare hard drive and then install the drive as slave in the "target" PC. You can then boot from a floppy and ghost from the image on the second drive. The main disadvantage of this method is that you have to open up every system unit and mess around with the internal wiring — not everyone is happy to do this. And sometimes it's difficult to get the PC to recognise and accept the second drive, I don't know why.
(2) An alternative is to "burn" the ghost image to a CD, boot from a floppy and ghost from the CD image. You don't have to open the case, so it is somewhat easier. But many older CD drives won't read from CDs which have been created with a CD writer, so you won't be able to use this method reliably with old machines. You also have to be able to access the CD drive under DOS, which requires special drivers. But with modern PCs, this is a nice method.
(3) I devised an alternative method to get around all of these problems, but it requires a certain amount of preparation up front and confidence in using DOS. It also assumes that all of your PCs have network cards, but hopefully you will have taken our advice and installed a network to make your life easier. Once you've got it working it's brilliant (he says modestly) so I will describe it in some detail.
- First you need to create a NetBootDisk, which is basically a normal boot disk with the addition of Dos network drivers, allowing the booted PC to log on to a Win 95/98 or NT network. Print out and read J.Helmig's excellent and detailed instructions for making this disk and then have a go - it's not as complicated as it seems. Note that you need to make a disk for each unique network card - hopefully all your PCs will have the same NIC as each other, then you'll only need one disk!
- Once you have created your NetBootDisk, switch on the master PC and log on to the network as normal. Find the folder which contains the ghost program and the ghost image and set the folder properties to shared. We want to be able to access this folder over the network.
- Make sure that the "target" PC and the master PC are connected to each other physically using either a crossover cable directly between the two NICs, or via the normal network cables and hub if you are ghosting in an existing set up.
- Insert the NetBootDisk into the target PC and boot from it. It doesn't
matter if the PC has Windows installed or not as you will be running this
PC purely in Dos. As the PC boots, it will load the Dos network driver and
then stop. Now type:
net load workstation <enter>
to start the workstation software. - Next you have to create a network mapping, which is basically a pointer
to a shared folder on the network. Since we want to access the folder containing
the ghost image, type:
net use h: \\pc-01\ghost <enter>
and watch that the command completes successfully. This command assumes that your master PC is called PC-01 and the ghost image is in a folder called ghost; use the correct names here if yours are different. And make sure that you put a space between the h: and the \\ or you will get a syntax error message. - What the above command does is to tell the target computer to use drive letter h: to represent the ghost folder on the master PC. So if you now change to h: drive, any commands you type will be carried out on the shared folder. So when you type ghost <enter> the Ghost program on the master will be invoked. Now simply ghost the image on the master onto C: drive on the target machine.
This whole process may sound complicated, but once you have mastered it you will find it quick and easy. Even with our slow Pentium II machines, it takes less than 10 minutes to complete the whole process. If we have a room full of computers to set up, we prepare two master computers and set them up at opposite sides of the room. Then two of us work down the rows of uninstalled PCs and partition them using FDisk, format them and run Scandisk on them, all in Dos. By the time we have set number 10 and 20 to scan, numbers 1 and 11 have finished and are ready to ghost, so we run long crossover cable from the master PCs to the target PC, and boot the target PC using the NetBootDisk. All 20 PCs can be completed in a morning.