As mentioned previously, I'm working on a corporate image.

I had an idea..and I don't know how well it will work with Norton Ghost, or how good of an idea it is...

We are securing the computers with some server side policies, such as hiding the C drive. We will be monting the My Documents folder on a server, which is obviously synced locally.

Would it be smart to partition the drive, to create a D drive for user data. This will not be backed up, it will not be company data. (Music, pictures, etc).

In addition, we will have a mounted network drive, so groups can share files.

I think the benefit of this would be that all the Documents folder would be backed up. Users are lazy, and don't always move stuff to appropriate drives. If a user Remote Desktops into a terminal server, all their documents will be available.

Just a thought....ideas are welcome.

Also...with Norton Ghost. If I'm currently doing this on a single partition drive, can I Ghost it, parition another computer, and install it on one partition, and then ghost the full thing (both partitions)?

I'm too tired right now to think about the idea, but Norton Ghost will create an image of as many of the partitions as you wish, and when restoring the image, you can select any or all of the partitions you wish to bring down to the local PC. hope that answered your question.

So I can image 1 drive..and when I blast it to another machine, I can make 2 partitions?

yes, when you image one drive, it will package all partitions on that drive, and when you "send" it to the other PCs, it will create those partitions so to speak. you will have two partitions on the new PC.

But can it create 2 partitions form a single drive image?

And..can we only replace a single paritition if we reformat? (I've not as familiar with newer versions of Ghost, and I'm not at work now to check it out)

It's been a while since I've used ghost, but I don't think so. However, you CAN manually create two partitions, and have ghost restore to one of the partitions instead of the physical drive. That's probably your best bet.

I don't know how much success you'll have with hiding the C:\ drive. Windows isn't very flexible when it comes to messing around with things like that on the system volume.

There is a group policy that forces user accounts to use a network share (or folder on one) for various system folders (My Docs, Desktop, Favorites, etc), and there are registry keys you can use to redirect system folders to other locations (either manually or via TweakUI). That might be a good way to implement what you're talking about.

Actually, hiding the C drive is a nice little group policy we enabled.

I will try it all out with ghost tomorrow or this coming week