Sysprep

[ray3d84]

I have to roll out a large number of PCs with the same hardware, software,
drivers with the operating system windows xp2. Can I use one pc and install
XP2 with all service packs, software and drivers and use that PC to create an
image using sysprep to be used for building all other pcs.

 

[Hunter01]

I have to roll out a large number of PCs with the same hardware, software,
drivers with the operating system windows xp2. Can I use one pc and install
XP2 with all service packs, software and drivers and use that PC to create an
image using sysprep to be used for building all other pcs.

If the hardware is the same across the board then no need for sysprep,
sort of like using a flamethrower to light a cigarette. If you're in a
domain environment just make sure the PC is not a domain member when you
take the image, and just use a tool like Newsid or Ghostwalk to sort the
SID before adding destination PC's to the domain.

Sysprep is a brilliant tool for hardware independant imaging, but due to
the way it works for this it is definitely not the ideal tool for what
you need to do, as it rapes the system some-what and you may need to do
a lot of reconfiguring, whereas a simple ghosted image will dump onto
the destination PC's exactly is it was on the machine you took the image
from.

 

[jim]

If the hardware is the same across the board then no need for sysprep,
sort of like using a flamethrower to light a cigarette. If you're in a
domain environment just make sure the PC is not a domain member when you
take the image, and just use a tool like Newsid or Ghostwalk to sort the
SID before adding destination PC's to the domain.

Sysprep is a brilliant tool for hardware independant imaging, but due to
the way it works for this it is definitely not the ideal tool for what you
need to do, as it rapes the system some-what and you may need to do a lot
of reconfiguring, whereas a simple ghosted image will dump onto the
destination PC's exactly is it was on the machine you took the image from.

I am not sure that this is exactly what you are looking for, but there are
other tools like Acronis Snap Deploy that will also make this easier.

Snap Deploy -
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/p...y|1157509337&gclid=CIiOz86muJECFR0Esgod4BsQDg

There is also a free application that I have yet to test myself at
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/. According to their website "g4u ("ghosting for
unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC
harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The
floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image
of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via
FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is
fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem
and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks
as well as partitions is also supported. "

Good luck!

jim