Cloning Xp Hard Drives?

[FrankF]

I am working on a project at work where I will be building seven identical computers... each running Windows XP Pro... with 28 PCI and PCI-X cards installed. Each will probably require installation of drivers and applications for 15-20 different cards. The last time I did something similar, it took 3-4 days per computer (after the first one which took two weeks) . I would rather not have to install all that again... seven times.

Is there a way to build up one system... get it working... and then clone it's hard drive six more times? I know that there are problems with doing this, as Windows Product Activation will not allow simply cloning a drive... each must have a different Windows XP product key, different CPU serial number, different hard drive serial number, different CD-RW drive serial number. Old standby products like Norton Ghost and Drive Copy probably will not work.

Does anybody know of any other product that is up to this task?

[tke711]

I'm not sure how you would do it, but there has to be a way to do it. I'm sure that people like Dell have many hard drives sitting around pre-loaded waiting to go into a machine.

[Sir Joseph]

Ghost will work, I use it at work. You just have to generate a new SID for each image dump.

[IamZed]

Ghost. It will do the trick and save you a lot of time.

[FrankF]

Ghost will work, I use it at work. You just have to generate a new SID for each image dump.

What is a SID? I'm not familiar with the term.

[Sir Joseph]

It's some sort of magic number that each computer has. MS uses that along with XP codes to track things, I think.
If you use Ghost, just use Sysprep and it'll do the rest. Then, when you boot up the cloned computer you go through the setup process, and hopefully you'll have the 30 days to activate.
It is tricky though because you can only clone a machine X amount of times (in other words, creating a new image from a computer that was previously imaged). I just redid some machines at work and I have no idea if the new ones will work.

[Sir Joseph]

You can check this out for more info:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prbc_cai_vnve.asp

[FrankF]

You can check this out for more info:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prbc_cai_vnve.asp
Thanks. I checked into it some more and asked IT where I work. It looks like Sysprep + Norton Ghost will do what I need.

[Sir Joseph]

Thanks. I checked into it some more and asked IT where I work. It looks like Sysprep + Norton Ghost will do what I need.NP, what you might want to do is run Sysprep with the minisetup on one computer just so you can get the sysprep.inf file and then copy it into Ghost's sysprep's configuration page.

When you mess up, and you will, (I still haven't gotten it straight) just be prepared to activate the computer half a zillion times.
Worse case scenario, as in my latest image, it no longer gives you a 30 day grace, and you must activate or you can't login.

But you will love Ghost. I can deploy a computer in less than a quarter of a time it took originally.
One thing to do maybe before you image is to add some anti-spyware stuff like SpyWare Blaster which is invisible to the user or IE-SPYAD which is a registry file of ~9,000 sites that are added to the Restricted Zone.

In any case, good luck.

[Sir Joseph]

My boss just emailed me this document:
http://ghost.radified.com/