Instructions for Creating a New Norton Ghost Image for the Henderson Lab E-4200 PCs

These procedure detailed in these instructions should not be carried out until a model "template" PC has been created. This PC could be any of the PCs in the Henderson Center. This will be the PC that all of the PCs will be modeled after using the Ghost application's PC "cloning" ability. It is important that the template PC be completely updated with the latest virus protection, software patches and applications requested by Linguistics faculty and staff. It should also be free from any extraneous applications or utilities that don't apply to the charter of the Henderson Center. In order to speed up the creation and copy process, any extraneous files such as Netscape and Internet Explorer cache folders should be emptied.

The only thing that you will need to build an image is the "Norton Ghost DOS Boot" floppy disk. This is assuming that the template PC is fully functional and can access the Alex-1 server.

1. Place the "Norton Ghost DOS Boot" disk in the floppy drive of the PC and reboot the machine. It is important that the PC have a hard drive that is formatted into two partitions, a "C" drive that is about 9.8 GB in size and a "D" drive that is about 3 GB. You may want to check the PC's "My Computer" settings to make sure that both partitions are present. Make sure to reboot the machine "gracefully" by selecting the Restart option under the "Shut Down" command accessible via the Start menu.

2. When the start up sequence of the PC recognizes the floppy disk and begins to boot off of it, it will display "Starting PC DOS."

3. Press "OK" at the first Norton Ghost 2001 splash screen. This will present a small menu at the lower left side of the screen. From this menu, you should be able to use the mouse. Click on the "Local" menu item followed by the "Partition" item and finally the "To Image" choice.

4. This should bring up a menu named "Select local source drive by clicking on the drive number." The only choice on this menu should be a listing for drive 1 at around 13 GB. Click "OK" to move past this menu.

5. On the "Select source partition(s) from Basic drive: 1" window, select part 1 corresponding to "Primary" and then click the "OK" button to move on.

6. This will present a menu entitled "File name to copy image to." Click the mouse pointer onto the "File name" field to place a blinking cursor there. In this field, enter "D:\" followed by a six-digit date code. For example, if you were creating a new image file on September 18, 2001 you would enter "D:\091801" in this field and then click the "Save" button. Don't worry, the Ghost application will automatically enter a ".GHO" extension onto the file. The "D:\" prefix is important because it instructs the application to write to the D drive on the PC. If you forget to add this prefix, then Ghost will warn you that you "cannot dump a partition onto itself" because it will automatically assume that you meant to write the image file to drive C. This is not possible because drive C is where the image file is being drawn from. If you enter the file name correctly and you receive a message saying "Invalid drive specification or non-existing directory" then that is a clear indication that the machine where you are working was not set up correctly with two distinct partitions representing drive C and D. If this is the case, then the PC will have to have its hard drive reformatted with a special drive utility and another template PC will have to be established on a machine that has the two distinct partitions.

7. The next menu should ask if you wish to compress the image file. Click on the "High" button.

8. Click on the "Yes" button when asked "Proceed with image dump?"

9. The Norton Ghost image dump status screen will then appear with a progress bar running along its top. When the image creation process has finished, the Ghost utility will display a box that says "Dump Completed Successfully." Click on the "Continue" button.

10. The menu at in the left corner of the screen should re-appear. Click the "Quit" button followed by the "Yes" button that will follow on the ensuing dialog box.

11. When the "A:\GHOST" prompt appears, remove the disk from the floppy drive and press Control+Alt+Delete to reboot the PC.

12. When the PC has rebooted, double click on the "My Computer" icon. In the "My Computer" window, double click on the icon representing Drive D.

13. On the window for Drive D, there should be an icon representing the Norton Ghost image file that you just created. Click on this icon once so that it is highlighted. Then, go to the window's Edit menu and select the Copy command.

14. Next, double click on the "Network Neighborhood" icon on the main desktop of the PC. In the "Network Neighborhood" window an icon representing the "Alex-1" server should appear. Double click on this icon.

15. In the "Alex-1" window, an icon for the "Files" volume should appear. Double click on this icon. In the "Files" window, an icon for the "Ghost" folder should appear. Double click on this icon.

16. In the "Ghost" window, select the Paste command under the Edit menu. This should paste the recently-created Norton Ghost image file into the "Ghost" folder on the server. The paste process should take a few minutes. Once the new image file has been successfully copied to the server, the process of rebuilding the other PCs with it can begin. In order to keep the server from being cluttered with old image files, you may wish to clean up the "Ghost" folder by deleting any image files that are older than one generation. That is you should probably keep the previously-used image file as a backup in case there is a problem with the file that was just created but delete any other files that are older. This is why it is important to use the creation date as the image file name.