[Pc_Support] I give up, how do you image Windows 2K?

[Jason Boxman]

On Wednesday 03 May 2006 19:53, eflester at myway.com wrote:
> g4u works very well with Windows 2000.  I use it nearly every day.  I
> maintain a small network of about 150 Win2K clients with Samba file
> services.  g4u is basically a slam dunk -- Mr. Feyrer is my hero.  We used
> Ghost here, what a pain in the neck.  I'll never go back.

Looks like a winner.  My only concern is having it `dd` or equivalent and 
compressing it on the fly, which probably takes a while.  Zeroing the 
filesystem to ensure a well compressed image probably takes a while, too.

Still, I think PXE booting and having the client simply recover and after some 
hours have a working W2K install again is probably worth the initial 
overhead, given I wasted three hours trying to fix and eventually 
reinstalling Windows last Saturday.  (Silly undeleteable registry key for 
which I couldn't assume ownership, not matter what I tried.)

How would you deal with the case where all the machines are not identical, as 
is prone to happen from some certain vendors, like Dell?  If they're 
sufficiently different, Windows simply won't boot unless you hack (at least 
XP) with unofficial support for more than one possible ATA chipset at boot...

-- 

Jason Boxman
http://edseek.com/ - Linux and FOSS stuff