I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but I just thought I'd make an update of what's going on.
I eventually ended up writing a script that created a batch file in the root directory of C:, which ran right before the PC was taken off line.
Everything seemed like it was going fine, until the day all the computers started coming in.
Now, I had inquired about getting a gigabit switch and a gigabit NIC for the 'server' we were uploading the images too. That request was of course turned down. I knew the ghosting would be slow with about 13 boxes uploading their image to 1 machine with a 100 Mb connection. Little did I know just how slow it would actually go. After almost 24 hours, half of them still had not finished, and the ones that did all seemed to be corrupt when I tried bringing them down on other machines. I tried reducing the number of PCs, tried adding a few extra boxes to act as servers, and eventually ended up doing about 3 PCs, each crossovered directly into another box. Ghost is still, for some unknown reason, running slowly.
My supervisor suggested taking a 80 gig drive, and one at a time connecting it to each PC and loading the image directly onto it. Not gonna go over too well when there's some 1500 PCs that need to be backed up.
SOOOO, I began looking for some alternative solutions, thinking that now they'd be willing to let me try just about anything. I ended up stumbling upon
This guy's site. I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a CD.
Turns out the thing is pretty easy to configure (well, for me it was anyway.) Luckily, the NTFS module is included with it (just have to modprobe it in one of the startup scripts.) I've managed to get smbmount and all of the required libraries on the disk, and somehow got that to work. Now I'm working on writing a script that'll take all of the contents on /dev/hda1 and put it into a tar.gz file up on a server somewhere (I'm thinkgin about taking 5 or 6 of the new spares and making file servers out of them. That way I'll only have 2 boxes per server.) This way, if any user does happen to need something off of his/her old drive, all the guy responsible for retrieving the data will have to do is open that person's archive in Winzip, and find the files.
I don't know how it's gonna go (because frankly, there was no reason for ghost to be running so slowly when those machines were hooked up one on one), but I figured it worth a try. I'm hoping that it'll end up being alot quicker, and Unix'll end up saving the day. That way they'll be more apt to let me use it again in the future.
Anyways, you are going to have bigger problems once you put those ghosted images back on entirely different hardware. If you're lucky the systems will boot without problems. You will probably encounter at least some problems though with blue screens and/or illegal exceptions as drivers that are on the image look and try to talk to hardware that is no longer there. To me this sounds like a support nightmare.
No, no . . . you misunderstood. Those images are not going on the new PCs, they're simply being made as backups (Just in case we have some user somwhere who's not saving stuff in the 'My Documents' directory, and doens't know what it means to back up data). We'll be keeping a few of the old machines around (they're leased, but apparently some of them were actually bought out by the Uni) that would be used to bring the image down on.
None of that will matter, though, if my way ends up working out.
