[Lan]

Heya,

Playing around with ghost - at the moment using cd's and such to boot a machine to and then connect to IP and drag down an image onto the machines...

Is there any nice step-by-step guides on being able to network boot without the cd's etc. (PXE Boots?)

tis symantec ghost 11 by the way...

Thanks

[sorinso]

There are quite a few, but how detailed you want it to be?
BTW, your NIC should be PXE compatible to be able to boot from network. Although most of the brand names by default include that, it is not obvious that your NIC does that. Bootix has a solution for that.

Links:
- http://thesystemadministrator.com/Th...ment_-_Part_1/
- http://thesystemadministrator.com/th...onis_-_part_2/
- http://www.sweetnam.eu/index.php/PXE...rt_Rough_Howto
- http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/

Disclaimer:
1. I did not check any of these articles myself, so you should follow them at your own responsibility.
2. I am not affiliated with Bootix in any way. I am not suggesting you to buy it's products, just to let you know there is a solution. There might be others too.

[Lan]

Thats great thanks.

its a new intel nic...


will it need dhcp to run properly? cause its all static...

------

So, putting that on hold...

whats the easiest way to make a USB bootable drive with multiple drivers on to boot to ghost...? (actually i think theres an option in ghost for that...)

[sorinso]

Originally Posted by Lan

its a new intel nic...

Then it should be PXE compatible.

Originally Posted by Lan

will it need dhcp to run properly? cause its all static...

Actually, not. I hope you distribute a computer image that was "touched" by SysPrep. This way, you don't have to worry about SID, hostname and IP. If not, there are only troubles ahead, dude.

Originally Posted by Lan

whats the easiest way to make a USB bootable drive with multiple drivers on to boot to ghost...? (actually i think theres an option in ghost for that...)

Why do you need bootable USB, when the NIC is PXE? Set the boot sequence in BIOS to start from the network (or set HD, then network) and that's all.

[Lan]

Yea, its pxe compatable - In the bios the settings are off/on/on with image server (dellstuff) and on with pxe

when starting up the pxe it starts looking for a DHCP server then gave up... from memory i can't remember seeing pxe working without having a dhcp server to grab an address from... how do you tell PXE to use a specific ip...?

and it'll definately be syspreped when I get a chance - at the moment i was just trying to get it working via the network - there's no dhcp server though...
so I was thinking of skipping back to USB bootable then the lil' ghost session you can specific IP and server IP to connect to and do it that way.

[sorinso]

Take a look at the first article I gave you in post #2 and you'll see that one of the components of a PXE server is the DHCP server.

[biggles77]

Originally Posted by Lan

when starting up the pxe it starts looking for a DHCP server then gave up...

What was the error code when it wouldn't PXE boot?

I also think we now need to know something about your network setup.
What is DHCP running on?
What operating system is the PXE environment running on?
More info along these lines. Ta.

[wullieb1]

I always thought it did need a DCHP service to work. From memory you cannot assign a static IP to a PXE client. I could be wrong though as it has been a while since i worked with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot...on_Environment

What you colud try is using GhostCast with RIS, http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...02101612025325 i could be way off track though as the version here is 7.5.

We used to use it and it worked fine for us.

*EDIT*

You could also just create a network bootdisk and connect to a network share and load ghost from there.

You could also create a WinPE CD and boot into a 32 bit enviornment and run ghost32 from a network share.

[Lan]

Yea, I am now starting to think it'd need a DHCP server...

The PXE was going to run on an XP box with ghost and the images and such on. that was its sole purpose...

at the moment its just used to connect to to dump and drag images from but there are lots of ghost boot discs laying around and it'd be nice to tidy them all up - then i thought it'd be nice to just have none...

[Wired]

We have a "server" w/ GhostCast Server 8 on it that's on its own VLAN. When we need to ghost PCs here, we hook it up to that VLAN (1 port w/ a switch for multiple PCs) and boot off of a USB stick or CD that's set up for multiple systems, join the session, and that's it. It's possible to ghost from a different VLAN, you just have to do Unicast and specify the server IP on the client.

Never actually looked at our boot disks, but I'll check them out, see how they're done. I know that the creator of them made a custom boot screen where we select the NIC / computer model(s), loads the driver, then boots ghost client.