Imaging Software
vanillagorilla3
Member Posts: 79 ■■■□□□□□□□
in Off-Topic
Anyone know of any good free or low cost imaging software? I work for a non-profit so our budget is really tight. I only have about 80 PCs, so I won't have a need for tons of different images.
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TWX
Member Posts: 275 ■■■□□□□□□□
I used to use Clonezilla extensively in the Windows XP era, but I haven't followed if they've kept the product up with the changing OS landscape. It could be used in conjunction with sysprep to basically build the template box, sysprep the box, then power-down the box and create images. It was best to artificially limit the filesystem partition to the minimum that the install could be performed with and to manually boot to the Linux console off USB or disc to manually delete the swap file before creating the actual image, but once the image was created it could be deployed from disc, from USB, or from the network with relative ease and fairly quickly. On first boot sysprep would expand the volume to fill the disc and the OS would simply create a new swap file.
If you try it, be mindful of your BIOS settings. We had some people blame the imaging software for first-boot faults that turned out to actually be disk access BIOS configuration mismatches relative to the template box. Whatever you use on the template, be prepared to use it on the production PCs. -
sthomas
Member Posts: 1,240 ■■■□□□□□□□
Fog is an option and I know several that use it in education (school districts).
https://fogproject.org/Working on: MCSA 2012 R2
