Making disc images

[Giles Orr]

On 23 November 2010 12:47, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:09:30PM -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
>> I have to set up ten Acer netbooks, with Windows XP (sorry) and software
>> and correct configuration, and I hoped that rather than setting up each
>> machine manually I could configure one the way I like it and then clone
>> the disk on the other machines.
>>
>> Has anyone got a tutorial and a set of software that they would
>> recommend for this purpose?  Thanks.
>
> I haven't done it, but maybe partimage would do it well.
>
> Package: partimage
> Priority: optional
> Section: admin
> Installed-Size: 964
> Maintainer: Michael Biebl <biebl-8fiUuRrzOP0dnm+yROfE0A at public.gmane.org>
> Architecture: powerpc
> Version: 0.6.8-1
> Depends: libbz2-1.0, libc6 (>= 2.4), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.2.1), libnewt0.52, libpam0g (>= 0.99.7.1), libslang2 (>= 2.0.7-1), libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg)
> Conflicts: partimage-doc (<= 20020126-6), partimage-server (<< 0.6.0)
> Filename: pool/main/p/partimage/partimage_0.6.8-1_powerpc.deb
> Size: 298160
> MD5sum: 809f02bd75afd10c70c6ea199bbeb0f9
> SHA1: 208e9ac2da5c75487f8544121f4909ecc69933c7
> SHA256: 71abccf42fd4493f68510b7dd5c715c1842ae89f5de538dbf31a55679bf10b99
> Description: backup partitions into a compressed image file
>  Partition Image is a partition imaging utility. It has support for the
>  following file systems:
>  * Ext2/3, the Linux standard
>  * ReiserFS, a journalised and powerful file system
>  * FAT16/32, DOS and Windows file systems
>  * HPFS, IBM OS/2 file system
>  * JFS, journalised file system, from IBM, used on AIX
>  * XFS, another journalised and efficient file system, from SGI, used on Irix
>  * UFS (beta), Unix file system
>  * HFS (beta), MacOS File system
>  * NTFS (experimental), Windows NT, 2000 and XP
>  Only used blocks are copied and stored into an image file.
>  The image file can be compressed in the GZIP/BZIP2 formats to save disk space,
>  and split into multiple files to be copied onto removable media (ZIP for
>  example), burned on a CD-R, etc.
>  .
>  This makes it possible to save a full Linux/Windows system with a single
>  operation. In case of a problem (virus, crash, error, etc.), you just have
>  to restore, and after several minutes, your entire system is restored
>  (boot, files, etc.), and fully working.
>  .
>  This is very useful when installing the same software on many machines: just
>  install one of them, create an image, and restore the image on all other
>  machines.
> Homepage: http://www.partimage.org

I've used partimage for both Linux and Windows partitions and it worked well.

One thing to keep in mind when cloning Windows is that it does use
some unique identifiers (the only ones that come to mind right now are
the IP address if you're not using DHCP and the Windows license
number) that need to be changed by hand on each install.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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