Hi Everyone,

I am wondering if any of you out there have been trying to ghost Windows Vista? I have 12 Dell Precision and would like to install Windows Vista on all of these machines. One of the method I have tried was to install Windows Vista Beta2 on one machine then ghost this machine to the file server. The ghost process went fine without any problem. However, another dell 380 machine with the same hardware configuration would not run Vista after the ghost process is done (run ghost from image.) It keeps saying that the system is misssing winload.exe file. I mean, I have done quite a lot with ghost for other operation systems but never have any problem like this. Do you guys experience some proplems like this with Windows Vista? Thanks.

i have been getting errors like that too, you should check out Imagex, new way to image Vista machines, you can download the BDD 2007 off of connect.microsoft.com

Can you be a bit more specific about this? Wher can I download this program and is there any article about this? Thanks.

download it here,
connect.microsoft.com

you will have to have a live ID, you can create an account for free, once logged in you can see all the beta programs that MS has to offer. one will be for Core Infrastructure Solutions 2007, this is the BDD (Business Desktop Deployment) and WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) combined with some other tools (winPE 2.0) and ImageX, there is tons of documentation that comes with, it should be all that you are looking for

Thank you very much. I will try that and let you know the result. Was you be able to do it with Imagex?

yes i have been able to capture both XP and vista images with Imagex

Ghost80 will work with Vista. I have to add the switch -fdsp when doing the re-ghosting. Without the switch, the error will come up when the system starts.

Well, I tried to ghost Vista beta2 and it worked fine when adding switch. But, it failed again when i tried Vista new build (5472, CTP released a few days ago.) I mean I did the same steps, but it failed just like before adding the switch. I don't know why. Do you guys have any ideas about this? About the recomendation from fizban2, i had a hard time trying to figure out which one I should download to run the imageX and others. I downloaded BDD and WAIK but found nothing that could help me to run imageX and others. Please advise. Thanks.

Can you run ImageX from dos? Or do you have to boot to WinPE 2.0 to run ImageX?

I like the way Ghost 2003 (dose-based) ran from a floppy. I actually used a floppy image and loaded the floppy image using Grub loader. It was instantaneous.

Is it possbile to do the same with ImageX - run it from a floppy?

Edit:

Just read up on ImageX. I see you can't use it in dos cause your NTFS HDD's won't be mounted. Oh well.

This post has been edited by spacesurfer: Mar 30 2007, 03:37 PM

Before ghosting your Vista disc, run these commands with administrative priviliges:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Ghost your disc as normally u do.
I don't know what these commands really do but i had seen this somewhere on msdn forums i can't remember. this really works.

I've read that Vista assigns drive letters by the HDD's and partitions GUID. If the GUID changes, then Vista cannot boot since it can't find the GUID. It can change for reasons such as restoring ghost images, moving the partition, etc.

The commands you states above remove Vista's dependency on the GUID.

That's all I know.