My employer recently bought a number of used PC:s, which all required Windows XP installs. The machines weren’t very fast (about 866 MHz/384 MB RAM on an average), and I didn’t really feel like spending 1.5 hrs x 10 machines on installing XP, and then running Windows Update, installing virus scanner, spyware detection, printers, FireFox and adjusting settings.
Thus, I decided to use Ghost… The first approach was to create a disk image file of the “master” PC and using it on the other PC:s, but accessing the file (located on an external USB hard drive) proved to be difficult.
The second option was to use the “peer-to-peer” mode, meaning the master computer rebooted into DOS/Ghost mode while the slave (target) computer booted from a “peer-to-peer network boot floppy” which Norton created for me. Both computers got IP adresses through DHCP, and all that remained was to connect them and start the copying.
I was quite surprised by the speed, a ~1.5 GB XP install took only 7 minutes on a 100 MBit network – pretty fast considering the relatively slow hardware!
All that remained when the transfer was done was to reboot, adjust the computer & user name and uninstall Ghost (since it was installed on the master computer, all slaves got it too – pretty silly but unavoidable). Voilá!
Was led to this enty by Google search.
I am involved in a similar problem. Plan is to clone an XP installation to other computers, purchase a new license for each machine so each is legal. Would like to know in advance what happens when the clones are booted and the old key from the original computer does not match the cloned machine.
Did this happen to you?
If so, how difficult was it to enter a new serial number? Does xp go bonkers or is there a a way to change the product info so that machine can be made legal?
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this