creating boot cd with dos client

[Migration User]

I'm using GSS2 trial and should receive our 3,000 licenses soon by end of march. A lot of techs at my workplace are asking me questions when i did a demo presentation for them. One of them was, if 100 brand new dell computers are shipped without an OS, is there a way to create a bootable cd that will install a dos client to have a connection with the ghost console? Also, this is a scenerio; one of our client has a computer that already have the ghost client installed. One day the computer crashes and gets the blue screen everytime the user logs in. This causes the console unable to run a reimaging task when the computer cannot boot into windows. Is there a way to drop an image on the client's pc without visiting it?

[Migration User]

Hi Peter,

Using a PXE server could be the most effective solution for both the situations. 3Com PXE server is bundled with GSS and Ghost Boot Wizard can create a Ghost boot disk image (for interactive use) or a Console Client image for the client to connect to console.

When you setup the PXE server with appropriate boot images, when you get 100 dells, say without the OS, probably you need to enable PXE since most dells comes with PXE off. WIhtout changing the boot order to boot to PXE (probably you do not want it to connect to PXE server every time) you can press F12 and select PXE boot. When the PXE menu appears, select the Console client and it will connect to the Console. From that point onwards you can control the PC from Console.

This could be used for the second scenario too, though it contains a manual step. If you call the user and ask to press F12 and then select Console client, you will be able to run a task to re-image the machine. However, I am not sure if you want to do it in that way since it will erase all the data in local disk :-)

Krish

[Migration User]

what about creating a bootable cd to connect to the console?

[Migration User]

Hi Peter,

Just using a CD would not work since we need to store some data in the drive during the task, specially for config changes. However, if you create a Ram disk and run the client from there, it should work since it is pretty much similar to PXE.

This is not a supported configuration, but it should work under most of the situations correctly. I am skeptical about dirve identification etc. depending on the emulations you use.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Krish

[Migration User]

Originally posted by shane dunlap
Re: creating boot cd with dos client
Posted: Mar 20, 2007 11:59 PM Mar 20, 2007 11:59 PM
OK, forgive me if I misunderstand what you're asking, but isn't this what the physical boot partition is for?

We do essentially the same thing as what you're asking. We have a bootable CD with our ghost boot partition on it. We've got the CD set up with menus to ghost the boot partition onto the hard drive (wiping out the OEM OS). The system reboots, connects to our server, and we can manage it from there.

Creating a boot partition in the boot manager is easy. Getting the CD set up was a bit more difficult (we're using PC-DOS) as the CD allows allows for multicasting and we incorporated drivers for all our NICs (about 10-15 different ones) for all of our machines.

Maybe this is a bit of a work-around for you, but it sounds like the boot partition would do what you're looking to do.


Originally posted by shane dunlap
Re: creating boot cd with dos client
Posted: Mar 21, 2007 12:06 AM Mar 21, 2007 12:06 AM
Oh, but obviously this isn't going to work without visiting the system and booting from the CD. A PXE environment is the only way I can see of doing that, which we (luckily) haven't had to fool with yet in our environment.

If you set up a dual-boot system (modifying the boot.ini in Windows) that allowed booting to the ghost boot partition, I guess that would work. But it would have to be set up ahead of time, and also could create some confusion for your users.

Assuming you had a boot partition and XP, if your boot.ini looked like this:

timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="GHOST BOOT - FOR RECOVERY ONLY"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Users would have the option to boot to the ghost boot partion, and it would start pinging the console looking for a command. Obviously you'd have to set up all your ghost tasks to be partition tasks, or you'd overwrite the physical ghost boot partition.

Again, probably not the best way to do this, but an option....