On a side note, I like how Symantec 'brags' on this forum with
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 is the industry’s most widely-used deployment, system management, and computer imaging software solution.
Yet they are killing this product....
Anyways, I've been experimenting with imaging the surface pro. If anyone else has any info to contribute, please post!
I've been playing with this for the last week. Here's some info:
Boot to USB:
Start your surface pro while holding down the + volume button. Disable "Secure Boot Control"
Reboot the surface and hold down the - volume button to boot to USB.
Ghost:
The surface pro will only boot to a 64-bit OS, so the standard Ghost boot CD/USB won't work. You will need to snag a copy of WINPE4.0 from microsoft and build your own WINPE boot drive.
See here for some more info on building WINPE:
http://www.deploymentresearch.com/Blog/tabid/62/En...
Since you will be using the 64-bit WinPE, you will need to use Ghost64.exe, not the standard Ghost32.exe.
Challenges:
The surface pro uses UEFI, as mentioned before. Ghost doesn't support this apparently; however I remember reading a forum post over at Symantec that hinted at the original developers including code to support it, so who knows.
Windows 8/ Surface Pro uses the GPT file system, not MBR, so this is another challenge. People say Ghost doesn't support that, but I can verify that the original documentation does include a section about GPT support, so it should work.
My attempt to deploy a ghost image to the surface pro "worked" because Ghost doesn't really care what it's deploying to. As long as it sees a disk, it will write the image to it. I was unsuccessful; however, in getting the surface pro to boot to Windows. It just kept going back the EUFI bios screen.
Last comments:
My image was built using VMware workstation, as I've been building all my images this way, and I did not have the partition setup as GPT. I'm suspecting this is why it would not boot. I have not yet had a chance to test further.