Creating Reloadable WXP HDD Master-Image

[Karant]

Hi there everybody! I have no experience in this department other then setting up ghost sessions at school for reloading WXP HDD master-image's on computers over network, although can anyone help me out and suggest the most practical / easiest way to create a master image of my WXP installation (including drivers, software, documents) that I can store on a seperate hard-drive / partition for easy re-deployment? Thanks!

Thanks for the help but let me clarify this image is only being deployed on the same single system I made the image on, I just want an image I can deploy every month so I have a relatively clean install all the time. Y'know?

 

[Joe Average]

While I'm not 100% sure of this, I think that Sysprep and some other tools are what would be involved. I can tell you how to do images using something like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, that's easy, but there are aspects of creating a massive amount of 'em for a network of machines that Sysprep is designed to handle. I'll defer on this one to another person that might have more info; I never really got into image deployment over networks in my career, but I retired from "the grind" of I.T. back around 1999 soooo... now I just work for myself.

It should be relatively easy to do with readily available tools, however.

 

[Karant]

Thansk for the response! Once again I'll clarify that I am using this for a single computer, of which the hard-drive is only 40GB, now can anyone offer any further suggestions? Thanks!

 

[swatbat]

First off you need the correct licenses. For XP you will want a volume license(open license) as it will allow you to use 1 cd key across all of the machines. Same thing goes with office if you are using it. Other big vendors like adobe also do licensing like this.

After that you pretty much built the image however you want it and use sysprep and an answer key to seal it. Using something like ghost or true image(I prefer trueimage) you can then blow that image down to computers via an external hd, dvd, or over the network. Yes you can resize the partition when you do it as well(ie enlarge that 40 gig partition to a 160 gig one).

 

[Karant]

Thanks for the help but let me clarify this image is only being deployed on the same single system I made the image on, I just want an image I can deploy every month so I have a relatively clean install all the time. Y'know?

 

[swatbat]

Thanks for the help but let me clarify this image is only being deployed on the same single system I made the image on, I just want an image I can deploy every month so I have a relatively clean install all the time. Y'know?

You still want to seal the image. If the hardware is going to be the same you can do a minisetup where it doesn't try to redetect all of the hardware again. You still want it to go through and let you configure the naming conventions and everything else though.