Custom Restore Disc?

[NeuromancerIV]

My company is looking at making custom restore discs for our customers new systems. We are looking a this due the increase in tech support calls we get from people who want to be walked through a basic reinstall step by step. Any ideas? The biggest problem I see is getting properly licensed software to do this for 3rd-parties. Also the CD image file may span more than one disc, depending on SW installed and Configuration. I'm trying to find a relatively painless soution for us.
What, if anything, do your shops use? At home I use CDRWin and make the discs bootable. But for the company, i can't use the SW for other customers acording to the EULA..Please Help!!

[Auric]

If you can find yourself a propetairy version of ghost ghost 6.5 makes ghost images onto CD easy , i did that for my own personal system, 3 cd's of data and the first one is bootable with the restore software. Surf around the Maximum PC website because they had a feature a while back on making your own restore disc's...

[Auric]

http://www.maximumpc.com/reprint/cle...eanstart7.html

that goes threw using a drive image program by power quest and making a bootable CD <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0"> Although i find ghost a hell of a lot easier

[NeuromancerIV]

thanks auric! will check it out!

[cyberhh]

Also while it is a hastle you can use pkunzip and lfnback to manually create a system restore cd. Personally this is what I use. It is stable, configurable and best of all - free.

The first step is to run lfnback (located on the Win9x cd) this program will create a backup of all the long filenames and store them in a database - then truncate the existing filenames to 8.3 Then zip all your directories, storing the paths.
Copy all the files (including a DOS executable version of pkunzip and lfnback with it's backup data file) to a bootable cd (you will need a boot disk for this). Then create a autoexec.bat file that formats the drive and unzips the files and directory structure back to how it was, then runs lfnback to restore the long file names. This method is completely free and relatevely painless.

[Papa Smurf]

Use ghost 6.5 give you the options to span a image over multiple CDs. Also its very quick, I use it at my work for system recovery, I can now recover a blank PC in about 20-40 minutes. I would use nothing else other than Ghost.

[J189]

we use noron ghost, works super!!

[Geek #1]

We use Powerquest Drive Pro for our image disks. I've never used Norton Ghost, but there seems to be plenty of support here on the forum.

Once the image is created, you could write a little batch file ot automate the process. Drive Image uses a text file to create a script, which can be added into a batch file. It sounds a lot hard than it really is. I'm sure Ghost would have a similar system.

[Auric]

yeah, ghost makes the first cd bootable, and all you have to do is select image to drive or partition (depending on your system config) and it will copy the cd to the drive, then when time comes, ask for next cd, and so on.. then reboot and remove cd and there ya go

[KamicarZ]

M$ also have an OEM prebuilders CD which can help in the auto/multi-level installs

[Kenny P.]

Use Norton Ghost. You can put the images on CDs and give them to the customers. You can tell them that this is a free service and that if they want to restore it themselves they will have to purchase Norton Ghost 2001 personal, and if they don't want to purchase the software, that you can restore it for a nominal fee.

This is what I did when I ran my business. Most people would opt for you to do it (bonus!) and I'd restore a system for about $25 as it's mindless work that you can do while doing other work, or drinking a beer ;-)

Kenny P.

[Auric]

hm not a bad idea kenny

In response to whoever emailed me asking for ghost, any major computer retailer should sell it, Ghost 6.5 Corporate is your best bet for mass backups etc, you can even set that up on your server if you all use the same machines ... <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

[darkspyre0]

ghost is the way to go!

[SoJo]

Depending on the size of the Image you're creating Ghosting or Drive Imaging the Image to a CD would be the way to go, you could hand the customer the Backup Image on CD.

However if the image will not fit on a CD then a disk to disk is another route to consider or network to disk (Your'll need to have a Networkable boot disk)

Hope that helps

[Addick]

Ghost is the best (fastest and easiest) software to use to do this however, WATCH OUT , symantic assisted in closing down the last company I worked for when they found out we were using it INTERNALY (not even shipping it to customers!) without a multi user licences (we had licences for an old version of ghost from before symantic took the company/product over) when one of the directors contacted them asking for an update they wanted £30 per system we used it on –at the time around 1000 pc per month- and when we said we would think about it they sent in the heavies. <IMG SRC="smilies/mad.gif" border="0">