Step involed in Cloning a hard drive

Freddie24

Just wondering whats the best way to go about cloning\ghosting a hard drive, I have been asked to install the same software and OS on multiple computers and have decided to do this by cloning the hard drive. Any hints or tips would be appricated.

Cheers

Freddie

dilallio

Are all the computers the same make & model?

Freddie24

yes all the machines are the same m&m

harney

What OS? Windows I'm guessing? If so Microsoft have some free tools for imaging servers and I assume desktops.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722145%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Freddie24

Ya sorry should of stated that in the original post, ya using XP pro and all the machines are desktops.

harney

The technet article should help you then. The tools are ImageX and wim files.

I did not use the imaging server part to push out the images as I was only working with 3 servers to get a hardened gold build.

You can boot off a cd with an attached usb drive and imaged from c:\ onto the usb drive. It is the same process to dump it back onto a new machine. With the imaging server you would, I believe, boot the machines off a cd and push the image from the network.

Alternatively, pay for Symantec Ghost.

WinOutreach4

Allow me to add to Harney's response... Check out the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - MDT. MDT is a common console for Microsoft's deployment tools (WAIK, USMT, MAP, SCM, etc..), and can enable network deployments and captures and create bootable media for use with CD/DVD or USB drive.
Also, you should consider that there are only 670 days of XP support left. The official page for XP End of Support explains the ramifications of using Windows XP after the End of Support.

Hope this helps,
David
Windows Outreach Team - IT Pro

yoyo

Clonezilla is a good free open source equivelent to Ghost

Nick

The_Thing

If a business is asking you to do this I suggest they purchase a copy of both Disk Director and True Image from http://www.acronis.com/ I have been using both for several years now and they are very reliable.

If you are going to be imaging new machines I suggest you wipe the drive first to get rid of all that 3rd party crap that comes pre-installed, install the OS, grab all the updates available, make sure you have drivers for all the different components, and install whatever applications are required. Then create your image.

ressem

If you are going to have to clone harddisks which have bad sectors beyond the ability of chkdsk to repair, and you're ok with linux then

You can use a ubuntu linux boot CD or USB key.
Select and add Community Maintained 'universe' to the permitted software sources.
Install gddrescue
You can clone a damaged disk using the command
ddrescue sourcedisk destinationImagefileOrDisk logfile

It will work around damaged sectors and come back to them when the rest of your data is safely copied. The logfile stores the work done which enables you to stop part-way through and resume at another time or on another computer. Then you can use the logfile to identify the affected damaged files to see whether they're worth sending for professional recovery.

Trueimage and most others just quit when they encounter damaged file systems.

Having said that Acronis Snapdeploy is pretty decent and easy to use for creating and restoring images of workstations and laptops in a business, it does all the sysprep stuff for you. A non techie can boot from a CD, choose an image file from the file server and let it run.

Skerries

I have used PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost ) which is very good

rockal

I dumped Acronis in favour of Casper - using for years and can't recommend highly enough.