Ideas on best Imaging/Cloning practise

[Yobbo]

Hi All

I work on behalf of a number of schools and updating 50 or 60 PCs per school
with the same software is a real headache.

Noticed that a number of posters use imaging/cloning techniques update PCs
en masse and I would like to get into this.

Company kindly lent me their ImageMasster once, but at £2K this is more than
my paymasters will allow and more than I want to be carrying around with me!

Best option appears to be getting a couple of IDE drives and an external USB
caddy unit so that I can plug it into any desktop or laptop and do the
necess. Issues I have are:

a) I've seen some use Norton Ghost and some use Acronis True Image. Because
the machines I deal with are Win98SE and WinXP on a variety of desktops and
laptops, which would be the best option?

Bearing in mind that a typical scenario would be that I would walk into
school, be given 20 or so pieces of edu software and then need to install
this software on say 20 x Win98 machines or WinXP machines (or sometimes
both!). I also have to config them for things like printers, networks, etc.

b) As I want to speed the whole process up even further, it would be great
if I could say:

* setup one machine with all of the necessary software, network, etc

* clone this setup as a sysprep (question: can you sysprep win98 machines?)

* make a few dvd or cd copies of this particular setup

* run these dvds/cds in the PCs to restore the generic setup. I know that
after this it would mean re-doing the product key, tcp/ip stuff, etc but
this is minor compared to the alt. Doing the multi-dvd/cd install means
that I can set say 3 or 4 machines off at one go rather than having to
restore one at a time.

Which prog would allow me to do this?

Any other pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Richard G. Harper]

First, SYSPREP does not support Windows 98.

Second, the choice of imaging software doesn't matter since it's the
pre-imaging prep that will make the process work or not work. How you image
makes no real difference. A properly-prepared image will make the
difference as to whether or not the process works.

Both TechNet and MSDN have copious amounts of documentation on preparing PCs
for imaging, so that would be the place to start.

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User] (e-mail address removed)
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