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efficient imaging software thats fast and bootable

U

user3657

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 23, 2007
Messages
239
I'm just a help desk kind of guy for my company, and still learning. But I think the way we go about imaging PCs isn't the best for us. I'm looking for advice from pros.

Right now we use clonezilla. its a pain in the butt though, throwing the CD in, taking 5mins to boot from cd and going through the prompts. this isn't so bad for daily use. If a random PC dies or for whatever reason we need to re image a few PCs a week, it does the job.

We are moving to a new platform over the next year, and we need to get all the sites we support new computers and of course then image them. As of right now that would be 960ish computers. That number could grow 5-10 every month for the next year.

Everything is last min here, our "lab" is about 10x20ish. Besides doing our daily tasks, we need to roll these new computers out. For example, we need 15pcs imaged and setup by end of day fri. I was just told today to help with this. I have another 11pcs for a training project due by end of day fri also. this doesn't include supporting people. I feel we are about 3 people understaffed.

I just think unboxing all these PCs then going through clonezilla on each pc is a hassle and might be a waste of time. We have a few kvm's setup in the lab. Its a huge cluster because no one really keeps it clean. crap all over the place.


Does anyone have any suggestions for imaging? Anything that will push images on the network? Like plug them in, boot, and go? or anything we can stick on a cd or usb stick where you boot from the device, and maybe 1 click to confirm, and it sends out an image? clonezilla would be great if we could like stick a script onto the cd or something so we could just drop in the cd and go. what do you use?

thanks in advance
 
I started out as an intern for a large health system and my first job was setting up multiple PCs.

I created a way to PXE boot ghost corp 7.5.

You use a PXE bootloader to load a memdisk linux kernel. It mounts an image floppy as a bootable, virtual floppy drive. Loads PC-DOC, particular NDIS drivers for whichever line of PC you're using and loads Ghost/connects to the Ghostcast server.

We have a separate floppy image for each NIC type dumping images or cloning images. 16-port usb KVM lets you switch between the server that hosts the images/Ghostcast session and tftp client.

We've looked at other stuff like Acronis, etc, but multicast seems to work really well. I recently added a 2960-S and we're able to do approximately 140-160Mbit multicast clones to over 15 machines at a time.

If you're interested I could probably scan and make a PDF of my 'how it works' directions. You'd have to find a legit copy of a Norton Ghost Corp 7.5 or 8.2 (8.2 requires larger floppy disc images but it works relatively the same)
 
I think clonezilla also does multicast and you can pxe boot it with UDA

Acronis rocks as well, but in order to be compliant - I think you would need to purchase their snap deploy product and a license for every pc deployed.
 
I like the Terabyte products. You can script the exact restore down to a command line. Their products are bootable from CDROM, USB Flash, floppy disk, etc.
 
I've just started at a new place. They PXE boot devices and use SCCM to perform a zero-touch install of Windows 7, all drivers, hotfixes, and base level applications (Office, AV, etc). Works really well. Haven't been a fan of traditional 'imaging' tools for a long time, too many client/server tools utilise GUIDs that must be cleared prior to SysPrepping reading for an image to be taken; forget one and you end up with a batch of dodgy PCs. No thanks.
 
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