Windows 7 cloning

[visioN]

Hi Guys,

 

I have a batch of Windows 8 machines coming which I shall be down grading to Windows 7.

 

I am wanting to clone these machines but I havenn't done any cloning in a while.

 

Last time I cloned was XP machines and I used SYSPREP. Is this still used or is there a newer way or improved version? Thanks!

[rslulz]

Large/small scale how many machines are you looking to image? I normally just push the image from a img file I've got on a usb Clonezilla - About is good, and free.

[speckytecky]

Second for Clonezilla it's free and seems to do the job well without need of huge knowledge of technical issues.

 

Large/small scale how many machines are you looking to image? I normally just push the image from a img file I've got on a usb Clonezilla - About is good, and free.

[dhicks]

Last time I cloned was XP machines and I used SYSPREP. Is this still used or is there a newer way or improved version?

 

I use FOG, which will PXE boot a machine (or a set of machines) and image them over the network:

 

fogproject.org

 

Windows 7 images are prepared with Sysprep beforehand, which seems to work well - Windows 7 sorts itself out a new machine ID on first boot, then FOG joins it to the domain with a given name. I've set up our machines to run an install script on first boot, so all out software installs right after imaging.

[visioN]

Thanks for the replies guys. My question was more towards if SYSPREP was still the standard rather than the imaging software. I've used Clonezilla and FOG, I'll probably be using CloneZilla on this lot!

[VeryPC_Tom_M]

Last time I cloned was XP machines and I used SYSPREP. Is this still used or is there a newer way or improved version? Thanks!

 

You can still Sysprep and use WDS to deploy, however WDS has become a WHOLE lot more friendly, via MDT.

 

No more remembering command lines! No more forgetting to re-add the image you just updated drivers on!