Re: The Perfect Clone: Am I doing this right?




I would boot the client computer off of either boot floppies or a custom
BartPE CD, connect to the server and download / write the image.


Well, last night I tried out my process. I found that I must not have
been thinking about sysprep the right way -- I thought I should use the
-reseal option on the master machine, as the final step to ready the
image for capture. It turns out that once I ran reseal, for some
reason it shuts off network connectivity, so there is no way for me to
ghost the image to my NAS. So, I had to run sysprep with the -factory
option, and then use ghost to put the image out on the NAS.

Also, I was wrong about Ghost - I can't boot with the Ghost CD on the
master machine and just have Ghost do a disk backup of that machine out
to the NAS. The Ghost application actually has to be installed and
running on the machine, and imaged from a normal Windows boot on that
machine. Which raises a strange dilemma: the image created for
deployment now includes an installed copy of Ghost. I'll have to
manually remove Ghost from each of the clients I build from that image
(!)

Once on the NAS, I was able to boot a second machine with the Ghost CD,
and find the image out on the NAS and clone it to the new computer.
MBR transferred fine, and all the partitions came out just like the
master image. Once I booted the new clone, I had to run sysprep on
that machine with -reseal, to finalize the build process and reset the
SID info on the machine. Upon the next boot, it went through the
normal EULA and license key prompts. All is good. I have a process I
can live with.

The image is about 12 gig in size (compressed), and it took about 15
minutes for Ghost to pull it off the NAS and build the new computer.
Just for fun, I tried running two clones at one time. The time
estimate went from 15 minutes to over three hours -- so my little
Buffalo Linkstation NAS is nowhere near able to do what a 'real' server
could do, in this regard. Looks like I'll be building one machine at a
time :-)

-Chris

.

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