If you want to create an image of your hard drive, you can do it in a number of ways. One way to do this is to boot your computer from a Symantec Ghost diskette and create the image using multicast, unicast, disk-to-disk, or peer-to-peer.
So if you want to create an image, the first thing to do is create a Symantec Ghost boot disk. This boot disk does not boot into Windows, but it does start the Symantec Ghost utility in DOS.
How to create an image using the GhostCast server?
The GhostCast server is a utility in the Symantec Ghost software. Using the GhostCast server you can create images of computers on the network or you can restore an image to multiple clients connected at the same time. All you have to do is start all clients with a Symantec Ghost startup disk, then accept all connected clients in the GhostCast server utility, and then simply push the image to all connected clients.
You must first make sure that the computer you want to create an image of is connected to the network. Of course, the GhostCast server computer must also be connected.
Start the client from the Symantec Ghost startup disk.
Now go back to your GhostCast server computer and start the GhostCast server utility by clicking Start -> Programs -> Symantec Ghost -> GhostCast Server.
Here you need to enter a session name in the Session name box.
Then enable the ‘Create Image’ option to create an image of the clients.
Then you click the ‘Browse’ button to find a place where the image should be stored.
If you want to create an image of the entire client hard drive, select the ‘Disk’ option. If you want to create an image of a particular partition, select the ‘Partition’ option. (In this example I describe how to create a disk image.)
Then you click on the ‘Accept clients’ button.
Now the GhostCast server waits for clients to connect.
You can see that there are no clients connected so far.
Now you go to the client that starts in Symantec Ghost and clicks (or with the keyboard) ‘GhostCast’ -> ‘Unicast’.
Enter the session name exactly the same as the one given in GhostCast Server.
Leave the ‘Discovery method’ option to ‘Automatic’ and click ‘OK’.
The next thing you need to do is select the drive from which an image should be made.
and click ‘OK’.
Here you can choose whether the image should be compressed to secure disk space. The options are ‘No’, ‘Fast’ or ‘High’ compression.
I recommend that you choose ‘Fast’ compression.
The next thing you need to do is confirm the creation of the image by clicking ‘Yes’.
Now Symantec Ghost is waiting for you to click the ‘Submit’ button on GhostCast Server.
So, go back to the GhostCast server computer and click on the ‘Submit’ button.
After clicking ‘Submit’, the image will be created and stored in the location you chose on the GhostCast Server.
You can view the details on GhostCast Server.
Once GhostCast progress is 100%, the image is created and you can shut down GhostCast Server.
You have successfully created your Ghost image using GhostCast Server!