Get your Ghost images into Boot Camp

Suppose you're in a mixed-platform environment, and you've got a library of Symantec Ghost images happily tweaked and configured for your Windows XP deployments. Wouldn't it be great if you could get those Ghost images into a form where you could use them for your Boot Camp machines? Sure, Ghost images are not really hardware-independent, but why not try?

At my office, this was a much-desired outcome; the problem was that the standard DOS disks used in Ghost imaging won't boot EFI-based Intel Macs, and even bootable CDs made with Ghost generally failed to see our multicast image server, if they came up at all.

We finally came up with a strategy -- a bit like the Wesleyan University process detailed here, which I wish I'd seen earlier -- for migrating a Ghost image over to a Mac, and thence, via NetRestore or WinClone, into a format easily cloned to other Macs. The key to this Rube Goldberg-like process, first suggested by my colleague Steven, is a free Windows bootable CD maker called BartPE. Read on for more of the conversion process, and note that Your Mileage WILL Vary.

The BartPE "PEbuilder" tool creates a standalone version of Windows on a bootable CD, designed for system administration and utility tasks. You'll need a copy of your Windows XP SP2 installer disc to provide source files for the build. While BartPE's functionality is similar to Microsoft's Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) tool, the BartPE setup is freely distributed; up until recently, access to WinPE required an enterprise support agreement with MS or other expensive contracts. The latest version of WinPE is built on Vista's core and theoretically bundled with business licenses for Vista, so I might try booting one of my Macs from it to see if it's usable for future rounds of imaging.

To avoid troubles with Microsoft's licensing agreements, the BartPE build is preset to reboot automatically after 24 hours, making it unattractive for workstation use. What it lacks in staying power, however, it makes up for in flexibility; the disk building tool comes with templates for plenty of Windows utils and features you might need. In this case, we built a BartPE boot disk and followed the instructions for adding Ghost support via the Ghost32.exe Windows version of the restore utility, plus support for external USB drives. Once we had the disc in hand, we collected our Ghost images on an external (FAT32 format) USB drive. The rest of the process goes something like this:

1. Boot your sacrificial target Mac (the entire hard drive gets wiped by the imaging process) from an external FireWire disk. Reformat the internal disk as MS-DOS (FAT32) in Disk Utility.
2. Reboot from your BartPE CD. Make sure the USB drive with Ghost images is attached at boot time.
3. Use Ghost32 to restore selected image to Mac's internal drive.
4. Reboot into Windows from newly imaged drive. Do not install Boot Camp drivers yet.
5. Defragment disk using Windows accessory. Convert your drive to NTFS with convert.exe if your image is FAT (ours were).
6. Optionally, run Sysprep to clear driver DB and SID. If you haven't heard of Sysprep, read this first.
7. Reboot from your Mac OS X external disk. If you plan to capture your image with NetRestore Helper, install the ntfsprogs package. If you're using Winclone, the NTFS tools are built-in.
8. Use NetRestore Helper or Winclone to capture the Windows boot drive from source machine.

The result should be a .ntfs file representing your Windows image; you can then turn around and deploy that to other Boot Camp-partitioned machines from Mac OS X. You may note that nowhere in this process did we install the Boot Camp drivers; in our case, that was intentional, as we wanted to take a base image and then deploy it to different hardware targets (iMacs and MacBook Pros), installing the drivers after the fact. If you feel adventurous, there's a walkthrough here on setting up an automatic driver deployment folder... but we figured we'd quit while we were ahead.

Our results have been good so far: over 20 Boot Camp deployments from a Ghost source, including many machines used primarily in Windows mode. If you've got Ghost <-> Boot Camp experiences, please chime in with what worked and what didn't in your environment.