TP5 :: Imaging 500 New Laptops

Computer cloning or imaging appears at first glance to be a topic many people know about. Upon further reading into many other sources both online and hard copy, it became apparent to me that the best way for me to learn about this process on a scale of 500 laptops is probably to actually try to do it.

What I mean by that? The imaging process gives you the ability to "clone" a computer, meaning copy an entire hard drive and its settings to another hard drive as an image rather than having to install multiple programs multiple times making installation time astronomically high and costly. On a smaller level, I found that you can take a new hard drive, insert it into the computer with the old drive and use any one of few software applications to actually perform the imaging process. You copy the image of the old hard drive to the new hard drive, then take out the old drive and boot from the new drive and it's just like booting from the old drive except now (in many cases) you have more space. Simple enough, but yet certainly not practical for setting up 500 laptops.

The second option is available from ImageMASSter. The ImageMASSter 6007SAS is a cloning station where you can image up to seven hard drives at the same time from one hard drive. This model supports many types of hard drives including SATA/SCSI/IDE as well as others. This option is certainly much more efficient than cloning one drive at a time, but this still doesn't seem quite effective enough for 500 laptops.

The final option I found was to clone over a network. However, I cannot seem to find any documentation for cloning a typical windows or mac operating system over a network. I found many sources that were based on Linux platforms and used ssh to perform the cloning, however I do not believe many schools employ Linux as a primary operating system yet. For about $60, you can purchase an application known as Symantec's Norton Ghost. Ghost seems to be the most widely referred to software program for computer cloning, especially when cloning over a network. This is absolutely the way to image 500 laptops. Using the server as the main drive image and loading that image onto each of the 500 laptops can be done simultaneously. Also, as long as the computers are attached to the network, if there are any problems with any of the machines, you can simply load the server image fresh onto the problem machine. Unfortunately, in terms of open-source software for cloning, there really isn't much if any for cloning on such a large scale. The freeware programs that do exist often come with restrictions including new hard drives cannot be larger than the original drive which is a major setback. Cloning over the network however even spending the money on Ghost is far more efficient and cost effective than any other means of imaging 500 laptops or any amount of computers on a network.