Cloning 28 Dell Laptops

[d4v0s]

Ok guys, I am curious as to how I am going to accomplish this.

Here is my current solution. Using a BartPE disk, I have got the laptops to boot and grab an IP, the mapping of a network drive isnt really working right. but i map it manually, Then i pull down an image using norton ghost.

Because BartPE is only set to use ghost 8. and i need ghost 11 to succesfully clone a windows 7 partition, I have tons of errors (i just threw the ghost 11 files into the ghost 8 directory. It works, but gives me tons of errors about VRAM.

I am tired of this BartPE crap, I am not a computer idiot, and bartpe works amazing on the older dells and stuff, but these are brand new latitudes.

So i guess in a round about way, what are you all using to clone your systems? I love having the images stored on a server and being able to access them anywhere, I do also have a bunch of usb hard drives i could use for this process.

And for future use I am hoping to find a solution that we can use to image multiple computers as we get around 80 computers a year and need to be able to load all of our system software and office and all system updates.

Thanks guys!

P.S. we are looking into acronis and paragon, but it seems we need to license each individual computer which is something i wont do, we have over 1500 right now.

P.S.S. Also trying clonezilla right now. we shall see

[Tripper]

you should be able to create a ghost boot cd with ghost, if you install the primary program on a system.
i dont think ghost 11 will work with the ghost 8 files (program files=no, .gho image files=yes)
was previously using ghost, but with the issues encountered, started using StorageCraft.
get a IT/tech license for it, its very easy to use.
fort that many systems, you'll be happy with StorageCraft i think

[JOEKILLA]

Acronis

[Coded-Dude]

linux..........pxe boot linux into the systems memory and than have it dd the os image from the server onto the local hdd.

[armygunsmith]

If the computers are capable of PXE boot, and they should be, I recommend checking out Windows Distribution Service(WDS

[Dark Paladin]

If loading Windows images, +1 on WDS (the new and improved version of RIS which is what I worked with before).

[meaty-btz]

WDS or the latest edition of Ghost Corporate Edition.

Anything less, is uncivilized. Free solutions that don't require a windows server 2008R2 license include Clonezilla and FOG Project.

Both Clonezilla and FOG may not play nice on any advanced corporate network due to both being designed around the LAMP concept for linux servers and thus include things like DNS and DHCP and a few even want WINS still, how archaic.

WDS needs to be considered carefully. Modern WDS operates differently than old RIS and imaging a computer may break certain programs, namely anything from SONY or any program that does bad behavior of dumping critical files into the WINDOWS directory will break on WDS under server 2008R2. This has to do with the fact that WDS actually installs windows 7 when you image it then adds essential cloned registry and program and user directories back in. The windows directory is completely rebuilt from the ground up and drivers reinstalled. This was done to allow it to be hardware agnostic and an image taken from one HAL can be installed just fine on another.

If you have funky programs use ghost corporate or dd or something similar. If this is in a domain, however cloning through DD may cause other issues do the the SID and GUID issues involved in that kind of cloning.

[Captain Jack]

Acronis

+1 on this.

[amd64]

XP - Ghost 2003 boot CD
Win7 - Windows backup system image and repair disc

[tools2teach]

Tried all of the above and we actually beta tested the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and it's much better then any of the products you mentioned above... imo. I had 4 USB sticks, imaged 22 XP machines in less then an hour. It really works well with Windows 7. You can also inject drivers for any workstation/notebook out there so its very robust. Bare Metal install through PXE can be a pain the arse. Imagine having 10 sticks....that's 20 minutes to finish the job. Imaging over the wire is way to slow.

[meaty-btz]

Tried all of the above and we actually beta tested the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and it's much better then any of the products you mentioned above... imo. I had 4 USB sticks, imaged 22 XP machines in less then an hour. It really works well with Windows 7. You can also inject drivers for any workstation/notebook out there so its very robust. Bare Metal install through PXE can be a pain the arse. Imagine having 10 sticks....that's 20 minutes to finish the job. Imaging over the wire is way to slow.

MDT has it's advantages but we dropped it after it caused more harm than good. Copying off a stick is too slow in a corporate environment. We have our WDS setup to nearly be zero-touch. That is as follows: initiate network boot from bios load screen (usually F12), walk off get some others started, return to select image as everything else is being handled in an Unattend.xml. Walk away, computer images, renames, joins domain, goes into right AD OU, everything. Without me being around. Now that is power. Add that to a multi-cast in WDS under Server 2008R2 and you can broadcast to hundreds of computers at once and still have bandwidth to spare.

Solid.

[brianinca]

>>>
Bare Metal install through PXE can be a pain the arse. Imagine having 10 sticks....that's 20 minutes to finish the job. Imaging over the wire is way to slow.
>>>

Seriously, you're mistaken. Did you even LOOK at WDS? You can setup a multicast for the number of machines to image, when he hits 28 waiting computers, ZAP and you're done in one shot.

meaty-btz - PERFECT!

Regards,
Brian in CA

PS I was doing multi-cast workstation imaging off of Novell 3.11 servers back in '94, it's not new tech it's just now part of the NOS and much refined.

[tools2teach]

>>>
Bare Metal install through PXE can be a pain the arse. Imagine having 10 sticks....that's 20 minutes to finish the job. Imaging over the wire is way to slow.
>>>

Seriously, you're mistaken. Did you even LOOK at WDS? You can setup a multicast for the number of machines to image, when he hits 28 waiting computers, ZAP and you're done in one shot.

meaty-btz - PERFECT!

Regards,
Brian in CA

PS I was doing multi-cast workstation imaging off of Novell 3.11 servers back in '94, it's not new tech it's just now part of the NOS and much refined.

Interesting, I'm looking into it. Anything to improve our imaging process is a plus.

[smird]

I'm lazy so:

[meaty-btz]

looks like more work to me.

Opening up and removing disks from all those computers? No way! Our computer to support ratio is so awful that we have learned how to be really efficient, though it comes back to bite us now and then.

We even managed to get WDS on Server 2008 R2 working in multi-cast across multiple V-LANs, epic. We are just a hair away from being able to utilize a central WDS server and initiate broadcasts across the WAN to over 36 sites located across an entire city (we have bandwidth to spare.... lots).. PRIVATE FIBER LOOP FTW!!!!