Lately I’ve been loving Clonezilla for rolling out refurbed Dell workstations. It’s been really cool, boot from USB “liveCD”, clone disk to disk directly over gigabit ethernet, reboot, repeat. But after doing 10 of them, I ran into the true limitation of Clonezilla. Clonezilla relies on ntfsclone and partimage (great tools) but they share a key weakness: neither can restore an NTFS drive or partition image to a smaller target – in my case it was a matter of a dozen sectors. It’s ironic because both tools only copy the used blocks and seem to support resizing but they just plain don’t do it. Needless to say I couldn’t accept that fact until I was done pounding my head against the issue thoroughly, then I used the de facto Windows imaging tool: Norton Ghost.
So, its 4:00 AM and I’m in the lab finishing up my Ghost disk-to-disk imaging on the remailing machines: total time to break remaining boxes and yank HDs + Ghost imaging time = 30 mins, time wasted to get to this point = 3 hours.
If anyone can prove me wrong concerning the shortcomings of Clonezilla, please do (and comment, duh).
Use Fogserver it does what you want i set up a 200 comp imagining system at my work. can plug a pc in and it’ll image automatically all you gotta do is plug the mac address into the Fogserver application which is run on a dedicated linux server.
imaged to different sized h/ds no problem.
200Comps imaged in 3 hours give or take set up time
I’ve seen that but I’ve never had a situation that warranted the setup. I image at most 4 boxes usually.
ya thats true however the set up is pretty strait forward as far as linux goes and it can be run on any box you already got running which is a nice deal when you just wonna up and do 4 pcs or even add all your workstations to it to do a wipe on any individual one at anytime have something go wrong with it.