I recently purchased some new Dell Optiplex 755’s and ran into an issue with one of my most tried and true tools, Ghost. I have used Ghost for a very long time but there is a growing issue with SATA drivers that rendered using ghost useless since it wouldn’t recognize the DVD-R drive. In a quick rush I started to research alternatives and ran into Windows Deployment Services (WDS).

I used it’s predecessor (RIS) a couple times in the past and really didn’t like it, so I was walking into this project with the notion that I could dislike it. I can say that ended up being farthest from the truth. Since most of my machines are PXE enabled I can boot off the network, and with a couple tweaks to my boot image (I needed to seed some network drivers into it) I have a great WinPE booter to work with.

I’ve been transitioning my images to WDS now which was a great starting point since I needed to start creating images with XP SP3 and Vista SP1. I can honestly say I am not looking back at Ghost.