NT Instalation

quozl

Hi guys,
I need some help with NT adminning. Any know how I can ease installation of every new machine that comes in. IE can I install automatically over the network? In Linux you
can use a boot disk with network drivers and it'll install everything. Can I do something similar in NT? Or would a bootable cd-rom with a copy of a pc's hard drive do?
What do you guys do in work?
thanks
Greg

_CreeD_

You can do remote installations, modifying th installation script for your network, I've never done it thoug so the How is something you're going to have to look up.

Don't use a copy of a normal installation. Each installation of NT gets it's own internal SID, it has to be unique. If you use a copy then you're going to run into problems.
What you can do is get Ghost and Ghostwalker from Symantec. Ghost will make an image of your fully configured installation, burn this to CD and use Ghostwalker to write it to the destination machines (It can autogenerate unique SIDs while it's restoring the image).

WhiteWashMan

you can use norton ghost over a network.
just pop in a boot disk, have your network card plugged in and away you go. you dont even need an operating system on the rive before you do it.
so you can roll out about 100 systems at the same time with the same profile. then all you have to do is log in as local admin, rename the pc, add it to the domain, and you are up on the network. log in as a new user and create their profile on the workstation. mpretty useful actually!

Gavin

yup, we use ghost in here too.
Excellent program, as wwwman was saying u can use multicast
ghost a rake of mahines in 1 go.. unlimited numbers i suppose. Takes round 30 -40 miuntes for us on a 10mbit network.

Gav

quozl

Cheers lads, thats brilliant
quozl

Canaboid

One more thing. www.sysinternals.com have an app. that will generate a new sid for NT so you can use a standard ghost image.