Ghost or Alternative Questions

[N3rv]

I work at a Help Desk at a business where I see about 20 new computers come though my office a week. I need a way to automate the install process of Windows, Drivers, and Software.
What I want to use to Ghost, or a similar back up program. I want to be able to boot off of a External Hard drive, into a pre-windows environment. Then I want to be able to do a full hard drive backup, or restore from previous backups. The reason I want a pre-windows environment because I don’t want ghost installed on any of these computers, I just want it to be something I boot into.
The question I have is, can I do this with Ghost, and what version if I can? Will I be able to use hard drives of say 200GB, so that I can have multiple backups from different setups? If I have to use FAT32, is there a way around the 4GB size limit per file? Can I use EXT2 with ghost, instead of a FAT based partition?

Maybe I just need to look at a different solution, I’m always open to other suggestions!

 

[Teknikallysekure]

Actually I do exactly this with a Windows 98 preboot, a nice little autoexec script with all my different image options, and I load Ghost 8. Never managed to get the newer versions to work, but I've been so succesful with this I never wasted much time trying.



Here's my batch hopefully to get you started in the right direction. You can use bootmagic to make the hdd bootable.


@echo off
SET DOS16M=2
rem Go to the section that matches the current
rem value of the CONFIG variable
rem Detect the source drive
set srcdrv=
if not exist \bin\bootdrv.com goto _nobdrv
\bin\bootdrv.com
rem bennylevel check? No! I think not supported by freedos
if errorlevel 0 set srcdrv=a:
if errorlevel 1 set srcdrv=b:
if errorlevel 2 set srcdrv=c:
if errorlevel 3 set srcdrv=d:
if errorlevel 4 set srcdrv=f:
if errorlevel 5 set srcdrv=g:
if errorlevel 6 set srcdrv=h:
if errorlevel 7 set srcdrv=i:
if errorlevel 8 set srcdrv=j:
:_nobdrv
rem if empty assume "a:"
if "%srcdrv%" == "" set srcdrv=a:

goto %config%

:gx620
cd %srcdrv%\diags\gx620
delldiag.com

:0102GdV1
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv1-0102_Apr06\0102GdV1.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:0202GdV1
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv1-0202_Apr06\0202GdV1.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:1202GdV1
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv1-1202_Apr06\1202GdV1.gho.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:1205GdV2
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv2-1205_Oct06\1205GdV2.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:1105GdV2
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv2-1105_Oct06\1105GdV2.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:1207GdV2
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv2-1207_Mar07\1207GdV2.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end

:0102GdV1_n
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv1-0102_Apr06\0102GdV1.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:0202GdV1_n
;echo Loading...
%srcdrv%\ghost\ghst8dos\ghost.exe -clone,mode=load,src=%srcdrv%\images\Goldv1-0202_Apr06\0202GdV1.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb
goto end
:1202GdV1_n
;echo Loading...