[FULL HDClone 7.0.6 Enterprise Edition Portable Boot Image
Christel Malden
Hello all! I am still having fun with with WDS and I am looking for expert advice on a way to clone a preconfigured Windows machine. I have a complicated computer setup that takes almost a whole day to setup and I need to deploy many more over the next few weeks. I saw on WDS you can capture an image but I am not sure if it clones the PC as an image to deploy and or just the OS. And or is there a better software program that clones a hard drive as an ISO that I can make bootable to deploy? I see all kinds of options out there but I need professional expertise on what is the best way to go about this.
If you use Symantec system recovery desktop edition and have a valid serial number you can boot of the recovery disk, map a network share or an external usb drive and backup to there. if you choose the backup share you can then image multiple machines at once. with WDS, you need to sysprep the machine then image it, you can also configure application installs and registry changes. But back to the symantec offering, their tool will allow imaging to different hardware, like laptops and virtual machines from the same image, even with different disk drivers as it allows the insertion of those drivers to the image once restored. here is the link.
We use norton ghost, it boots off a CD and we just clone to an internal drive that we plug in or a USB drive. I had a little dabble with Acronis which is a much more up to date version than the ghost we were using and it seems good. Just make an image onto an external drive and just boot off the CD and clone it back every time.
If he is running windows 7, he can just PXE boot a thumb drive with a wim image on it. This is so easy to do and it cost nothing and it takes up less space. So please let us know what operation system you are using on the POS machines.
I have used Clone Zilla which is freeware and clone the whole harddisk image then after you can use that image for multiple pc build with same configuration and software. Takes only 20 mins to build 1 pc.