Problem: I work for a medium size company and we have been trying to deploy Windows 2000 PRO across the company via Norton Ghost 7.0 on Dell optiplex 110 and Gx1 machines. When I download an image to a different machine other than the original,the machine will not boot. What happens is that Windows will start to boot, when the first status bar comes up (black screen with white status bar)it completes then restarts in an endless cycle. I've ran sysprep with -pnp switch before cloning the original. I've tried running ghost with -fdsz switch. Nothing has worked succesfully. Any Ideas would be greatly appreciated.

You need to run ghost walk prior to booting into Win2K

This is interesting...Ghost Walker changes the SID file... However, I'm at a large university and we are currently rolling out W2K on Dell GX240 machines...We just loaded up a Dell GX240 with W2K and whatever else we wanted, then we ghosted that image to the server and now whenever we set up a new machine we just download that image... We don't run ghost walker...and everything works ok? Don't know why...

You don't need to run Ghostwalker. The SID is not the problem. All the same SID would do is complain about having the same SID as another machine when you try to log on to your network. It has nothing to do with a rebooting cycle problem. And sysprep can be set up to strip the SID. How are you ghosting the original machine? are you ghosting the entire drive or just a partition. Also, are you usning the default settings on the bootdisk or have you changed them?

Answer to Roger the Shrubber: Basically on the original machine that I am cloning, I've ghosted a small 2 gig drive with Win2kpro and all of our pertinent business applications installed. Prior to ghosting I run sysprep, after the shutdown I then run the image. I left all the default settings within ghost. Currently I am looking into other Disk imaging software such as Powerquest DeployCenter 5.0, however any tips that you can provide would be helpful. I know that there's gotta to be a way clone the machine, because dell does it when they ship out PC's.

After hours of much frustration finally we found a fix. ACPI was enabled on my original machine that I did the clone from. When I downloaded the image on the new machine ACPI was turned off. When windows tried enable ACPI upon startup and was not able to the endless cycle of restarts began. Check ACPI settings when doing Win2k images. So Long happy trails

Anthony, Ghost should work for you. We've used it on well over 1000 systems with no problems. Try building a machine without running sysprep,.then ghost it and see if that works. It could be something in the sysprep setup that is causing the problem.