Posted: 4/16/2014 4:28:22 PM EDT
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Hello all,
I consider myself to be rather good with computers, but I'm having some difficulty conceptually understanding how to do what I want to do. Let me get into the meat an potatoes about my problem. At my work, we have roughly 5-10 tough book laptops with specific software installed on them. They are all operating under the same windows license and all have identical hardware. We have had some issues with hard drive failures over the last year or so and when we get a new hard drive, it takes the better part of a day to re-install all the necessary software. So, here is my question - I would like to have a relatively easy way to download a copy of the old hard drive onto a new one when we must replace it. How is the best way to do this? I'm on a tight budget, so image licenses for each computer through symantec ghost or carbon copy really isn't the most ideal thing, plus I have heard how unreliable system imaging can be. Any suggestions for this? Thanks all! CBM |
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Quoted: Hello all, I consider myself to be rather good with computers, but I'm having some difficulty conceptually understanding how to do what I want to do. Let me get into the meat an potatoes about my problem. At my work, we have roughly 5-10 tough book laptops with specific software installed on them. They are all operating under the same windows license and all have identical hardware. We have had some issues with hard drive failures over the last year or so and when we get a new hard drive, it takes the better part of a day to re-install all the necessary software. So, here is my question - I would like to have a relatively easy way to download a copy of the old hard drive onto a new one when we must replace it. How is the best way to do this? I'm on a tight budget, so image licenses for each computer through symantec ghost or carbon copy really isn't the most ideal thing, plus I have heard how unreliable system imaging can be. Any suggestions for this? Thanks all! CBM If you just want to clone one hdd to another, and the new hard drive is the same size or bigger, just use clonezilla. It's an ISO you burn to disc and boot from. ETA: But if you're dealing with failing/failed hard drives then the cloned image might have issues, or cloning wont work at all. Dealing with data on a failing/failed HDD can be tricky. You could do a fresh installs on a hard drive, up to before the point it starts becoming personalized for specific users, and then clone that image and save it somewhere. Then just use that as the recovery image. Slipstreaming might also be a good option for you. |
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Quoted: Would I be able to accomplish this using a large enough USB drive or would an external be preferable? What exactly would you be using the USB drive or external for? If you're talking about creating a recovery image of windows + software to deploy on a new hard drive, which would mean only personalization would need to be done for the user, you could store that on a USB drive or flash drive depending on the size the image is. I can't tell you how big it will be. ETA: To further clarify what I'm proposing... You install windows, software, make config changes, etc on a new hard drive. Before you start adding user-specific software, changes, or settings you clone that hard drive. You now have a base image you can redeploy over and over whenever one of their hard drives fail. This saves you the trouble of installing everything from scratch. Just clone that backed up image to their new hard drive, run windows update, and do whatever needs to be done for them to use it(local or domain user account, specific apps that user might need that not all the other users have, etc). This greatly speeds up redeployment for you in the even of a hard drive failure as long as you don't lose that backed up recovery image you created. That image should cover everything that all the users need, you just add the stuff only certain users need. As far as I know that image can be saved to a USB drive and copied from that USB drive to a hard drive via clonezilla. External hard drive should work too. |
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If your laptops are running Windows7 it has imaging capabilities included. Google Windows7 imaging, its may
take a bit of reading to understand but it's pretty straight forward. Clonezilla is great imaging software it takes a bit to get used to it but once you do it works great. USB drives or dvd discs are for storing the image file till your ready for the new drive. |
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Quoted:
What exactly would you be using the USB drive or external for? If you're talking about creating a recovery image of windows + software to deploy on a new hard drive, which would mean only personalization would need to be done for the user, you could store that on a USB drive or flash drive depending on the size the image is. I can't tell you how big it will be. ETA: To further clarify what I'm proposing... You install windows, software, make config changes, etc on a new hard drive. Before you start adding user-specific software, changes, or settings you clone that hard drive. You now have a base image you can redeploy over and over whenever one of their hard drives fail. This saves you the trouble of installing everything from scratch. Just clone that backed up image to their new hard drive, run windows update, and do whatever needs to be done for them to use it(local or domain user account, specific apps that user might need that not all the other users have, etc). This greatly speeds up redeployment for you in the even of a hard drive failure as long as you don't lose that backed up recovery image you created. That image should cover everything that all the users need, you just add the stuff only certain users need. As far as I know that image can be saved to a USB drive and copied from that USB drive to a hard drive via clonezilla. External hard drive should work too. Quoted:
Quoted:
Would I be able to accomplish this using a large enough USB drive or would an external be preferable? What exactly would you be using the USB drive or external for? If you're talking about creating a recovery image of windows + software to deploy on a new hard drive, which would mean only personalization would need to be done for the user, you could store that on a USB drive or flash drive depending on the size the image is. I can't tell you how big it will be. ETA: To further clarify what I'm proposing... You install windows, software, make config changes, etc on a new hard drive. Before you start adding user-specific software, changes, or settings you clone that hard drive. You now have a base image you can redeploy over and over whenever one of their hard drives fail. This saves you the trouble of installing everything from scratch. Just clone that backed up image to their new hard drive, run windows update, and do whatever needs to be done for them to use it(local or domain user account, specific apps that user might need that not all the other users have, etc). This greatly speeds up redeployment for you in the even of a hard drive failure as long as you don't lose that backed up recovery image you created. That image should cover everything that all the users need, you just add the stuff only certain users need. As far as I know that image can be saved to a USB drive and copied from that USB drive to a hard drive via clonezilla. External hard drive should work too. That is exactly what I am looking for, wasn't sure how possible it was...I know that images can be pretty touchy in regards to corrupted bytes and stuff like that. I only have about 16 GBs of data that I am wanting to clone. Do you think there would be any compatibility issues if I clone computer A and then place that cloned image onto computer B? |
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Quoted: That is exactly what I am looking for, wasn't sure how possible it was...I know that images can be pretty touchy in regards to corrupted bytes and stuff like that. I only have about 16 GBs of data that I am wanting to clone. Do you think there would be any compatibility issues if I clone computer A and then place that cloned image onto computer B? Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Would I be able to accomplish this using a large enough USB drive or would an external be preferable? What exactly would you be using the USB drive or external for? If you're talking about creating a recovery image of windows + software to deploy on a new hard drive, which would mean only personalization would need to be done for the user, you could store that on a USB drive or flash drive depending on the size the image is. I can't tell you how big it will be. ETA: To further clarify what I'm proposing... You install windows, software, make config changes, etc on a new hard drive. Before you start adding user-specific software, changes, or settings you clone that hard drive. You now have a base image you can redeploy over and over whenever one of their hard drives fail. This saves you the trouble of installing everything from scratch. Just clone that backed up image to their new hard drive, run windows update, and do whatever needs to be done for them to use it(local or domain user account, specific apps that user might need that not all the other users have, etc). This greatly speeds up redeployment for you in the even of a hard drive failure as long as you don't lose that backed up recovery image you created. That image should cover everything that all the users need, you just add the stuff only certain users need. As far as I know that image can be saved to a USB drive and copied from that USB drive to a hard drive via clonezilla. External hard drive should work too. That is exactly what I am looking for, wasn't sure how possible it was...I know that images can be pretty touchy in regards to corrupted bytes and stuff like that. I only have about 16 GBs of data that I am wanting to clone. Do you think there would be any compatibility issues if I clone computer A and then place that cloned image onto computer B? Also, changes in hardware will require reactivating Windows, assuming you're running Win 7 or newer. |
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Quoted: That is exactly what I am looking for, wasn't sure how possible it was...I know that images can be pretty touchy in regards to corrupted bytes and stuff like that. I only have about 16 GBs of data that I am wanting to clone. Do you think there would be any compatibility issues if I clone computer A and then place that cloned image onto computer B? Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Would I be able to accomplish this using a large enough USB drive or would an external be preferable? What exactly would you be using the USB drive or external for? If you're talking about creating a recovery image of windows + software to deploy on a new hard drive, which would mean only personalization would need to be done for the user, you could store that on a USB drive or flash drive depending on the size the image is. I can't tell you how big it will be. ETA: To further clarify what I'm proposing... You install windows, software, make config changes, etc on a new hard drive. Before you start adding user-specific software, changes, or settings you clone that hard drive. You now have a base image you can redeploy over and over whenever one of their hard drives fail. This saves you the trouble of installing everything from scratch. Just clone that backed up image to their new hard drive, run windows update, and do whatever needs to be done for them to use it(local or domain user account, specific apps that user might need that not all the other users have, etc). This greatly speeds up redeployment for you in the even of a hard drive failure as long as you don't lose that backed up recovery image you created. That image should cover everything that all the users need, you just add the stuff only certain users need. As far as I know that image can be saved to a USB drive and copied from that USB drive to a hard drive via clonezilla. External hard drive should work too. That is exactly what I am looking for, wasn't sure how possible it was...I know that images can be pretty touchy in regards to corrupted bytes and stuff like that. I only have about 16 GBs of data that I am wanting to clone. Do you think there would be any compatibility issues if I clone computer A and then place that cloned image onto computer B? Yes, assuming Computer A and Computer B aren't the same specs. Different hardware requires different drivers and an HDD image from one machine might or might not boot on a different machine due to those differences in hardware and drivers. If they're the same exact spec machines then you're fine, same HDD image should work on both. When Windows installs it installs drivers and other stuff specific to the hardware its being installed to. If you then take this Windows install over to a different-spec machine you risk boot failure, blue screens, and other issues. Very few occasions I've seen this actually work without any problems. ETA: Looks like someone beat me to it.  |
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I used to do this all the time.
I would order a batch of laptops. create an image of one of them before it was even booted up. save it. boot it up and then install whatever software package that was needed and then image a copy of that drive off. if anyone's died, I can reimage a new drive and have them running in about 30 min to an hour depending on what image I was uploading. I would do this over the network against an image on the network, so it slowed it down a bit. on dvd or cd it was faster, but that was in the xp or 2000 days when you could fit the whole os on a cd. network was needed once you went up to vista and the image size ballooned out to 12gb or higher. ghost was good to me on this, but there are probably better options now. if the batch was built close enough together, windows doesn't even ask for registering again. if it isn't just takes a second after it is connected to the internet. worst case you have to put the key back in, or call. drivers can be update after it boots up. have them store personal stuff on the network or back it up nightly onto the network automatically with sync toy from MS. |