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

[eflester at myway.com]

As far as speed goes, a lot depends on the processing power of the PC and the quality of the network connection.  You can run g4u from one IDE hard drive to another within the same machine, or even to another partition on the same disk, although that's not how I routinely use it.

In my environment, the upload of a typical 20GB hard drive image that has been zeroed will take around 30 - 60 minutes.  The downloads are faster, usually taking around 10 minutes.  

One trick I use a lot is to set up my image on a small (10GB) hard drive.  This will create a 10GB partition on the target drive when restoring and things go a little faster. This is probably of limited help to you in your situation, though.

The issue of different hardware can be a problem.  One thing that will not work, in my experience, is trying to move an image onto a hard drive smaller than the one on which it was created.  Other hardware issues sort of "depend," and I'm no expert on that stuff.  

The way I handle it here is that I have about 6 types of PC and I keep 6 different images on my ftp server.  Periodically I update my images on the PCs and clone to the server, discarding the old image to save space.  Your particular problem (I imagine) is that you may want to move an image from one PC to another of a different type.  That could definitely be a problem.  I have some around here that are similar enough that I can get away with it -- the chipsets are often the key.  But if, as you say, you're working with a proprietary monstrosity like a Dell, I don't know what's going to happen.

I hope this was helpful.  I have my own procedural documents for cloning and re-imaging, which I'd be glad to send you.  They're pdf format.  They are of course specific to my operation but may contain some useful information.

Eric Lester





 --- On Sat 05/06, Jason Boxman < jasonb at edseek.com > wrote:
From: Jason Boxman [mailto: jasonb at edseek.com]
To: pc_support at matrixlist.com
Date: Sat, 6 May 2006 03:45:38 -0400
Subject: Re: [Pc_Support] I give up, how do you image Windows 2K?

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 Boxmanhttp://edseek.com/ - Linux and FOSS stuff_______________________________________________Pc_support mailing listPc_support at matrixlist.comhttp://lists.matrixlist.com/mailman/listinfo/pc_support

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