[SoCoSA/discuss] Replicating a Win XP install to other computers

[Andrew]

Thanks for your replies, Trevor. They've been quite helpful to
me. It seems, however, that replicating the software installs may
be out of the volunteer group's hands. I just heard today that
the school district apparently has someone else on hand who most
likely will be taking care of cloning the systems. We're waiting
for final confirmation on that.

Still, I'm learning a thing or two about cloning Microsoft
systems that likely will come in handy at some point in the
future. For instance, I didn't know Ghost could be told not to
clone user accounts when it does the rest of the system. Nor had
I ever heard of ghostwalker before. Useful stuff to file away in
the dark recesses of my brain in case I come up against such a
scenario again. Linux is still far easier to deal with, but it's
nearly impossible to avoid Microsoft completely.

Have a good (long) weekend.

A.


Trevor Benson wrote on Fri, 26 May 2006 16:49:46 -0700:

> I guess it depends on the product, but customizing accounts
> should have no bearing on cloning a system, if you are duping
> the drive.  If you are using ghost or other clone software it
> depends on if you tell it to copy user accounts along with the
> system.
> 
> I have easily used ghost to clone over 100 machines prejoined
> to a domain with the ghostwalker (SID converter) performing its
> task so you don_t have rogue systems with the same SID. 
> Although Administrator was really the only user on the system
> while copying since a domain was being used.  Running 100Mbps
> usually took between 5-20 minutes to clone sizes between 1.5GB
> to 3.5GB.
> 
> Its been awhile since I used the more recent versions of ghost,
> but for corporate and enterprise environments it works really
> nicely, plus makes restoring a system 'someone' screws up take
> about 15 minutes and then its back the way it was, no opening
> the box up and removing the disk to re-dupe it again.