Seemless way to restore image from flash drive

[UncleDavid218]

Hi all,

I have a client with an Asus Zenbook (UX31a). He is lives about 2,000 miles from his corporate office and is not savvy (and 84 years old), but every year or so something happens and his OS is hosed. I'd like a solution where he can just plug in a USB flash drive, reboot, and hit next next and next and restore it back to a base image. Is something like this do-able? I'm trying to use Acronis but the bootable software requires FAT32 file systems and the image of the drive is 40GB, so it will only work on NTFS. Having 2 partitions on a flash drive just doesn't work very well at all. For some reason I couldn't get it to work on an external hard drive either.

 

[PTNL]

Look into Windows Imaging for the thumbdrive option.

However, Acronis' "True Image Home" product has a cool capability that gives a "Press F11 to start recovery" prompt (after the POSTing process finishes) to start a wizard GUI to recover a machine from an image.

 

[teh_chem]

The Zenbook doesn't come with a recovery partition and accompanying pre-installed recovery program? My previous ASUS laptop did, I imagined all of them do. No?

 

[UncleDavid218]

Look into Windows Imaging for the thumbdrive option.

However, Acronis' "True Image Home" product has a cool capability that gives a "Press F11 to start recovery" prompt (after the POSTing process finishes) to start a wizard GUI to recover a machine from an image.

That sounds like it might be what I'm looking for, I'll look into it. Thanks!

The Zenbook doesn't come with a recovery partition and accompanying pre-installed recovery program? My previous ASUS laptop did, I imagined all of them do. No?

Yes it does, but that is a factory base image. This needs Office 2010 Pro, a Kaseya remote control agent on it, etc. Walking him through the installation of even the Kaseya Agent just isn't feasible - he's the Pres. & CEO of a $80m/year company and won't have any of that.

 

[jthomas]

Clonezilla can make live recovery disks or usb drives that will require just one or two prompts to restore an image from disk/usb.

 

[Demon10000]

Hi all,
I'm trying to use Acronis but the bootable software requires FAT32 file systems and the image of the drive is 40GB, so it will only work on NTFS.

I gave up imaging back when Ghost was the primary tool, so if this isn't still relevant, my apologies.

I used to get around this problem by splitting the image into multiple files. There was a "max size" option that would split it into x size image files.

It's hard to justify for just one machine, but I really believe in scripted unattended installations over imaging... That way, when your customer gets a new machine, the same installation will most likely work without any modifications.