Chapter 15: Cloning Disks with Sysprep

Chapter 15

Cloning Disks with Sysprep

Disk imaging entails taking a snapshot of a computer's configuration, which includes Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Windows) and applications such as those in Microsoft Office 2003 Editions, and then deploying that snapshot to other computers in the organization. It's essentially like installing Windows on a computer's hard disk and then copying that hard disk to other computers. Use disk imaging to deploy clean Windows installations in large organizations when hundreds of computers require the same configuration. Disk imaging is more effective when organizations have standard hardware configurations, but with a tweak here and there, it is a method that can be used in companies that tend to purchase whatever computer is popular at the time.

Even though I say that disk imaging is for large organizations, I use it in my small 25-PC shop. It's more convenient and much quicker to install Windows from a disk image than by running the setup program from scratch. This is a major productivity boost for me because I install Windows in my lab a few dozen times a week.

Disk imaging has two sides: good and bad. First the good: disk imaging is the fastest way to deploy Windows. Rather than installing the operating system from the CD, which can take 45 minutes or longer, a disk image installs in less than 10 minutes. And with multicasting technologies, you can deploy disk images to many computers at the same time. Possibly the biggest benefit of disk imaging is that you can include third-party applications and custom settings to standardize desktop computers throughout the enterprise, and you do all that without requiring user interaction. Now for the bad: you can't use disk imaging to upgrade from an earlier version of Windows because you're replacing the hard disk's contents. That means users' documents, settings, and applications are lost unless you use the User State Migration Tool (USMT) that's on the Windows CD in the ValueAdd directory. Also, disk imaging requires somewhat compatible sample and target hardware configurations, although you can mitigate this issue a bit by using the techniques you learn in this chapter. An additional concern is that multicasting can bring a network to its knees, so you must manage the rollout so that it doesn't affect the productivity of users. The last problem is that deploying disk images to remote computers is difficult–but it's not impossible if you can fit the images on CDs.

The benefits of disk imaging far outweigh the potential problems, particularly in large enterprises. Disk imaging got better with Windows than it was with Windows 2000; new Windows disk-imaging tools significantly reduce the number of disk images that you maintain now. The Microsoft Web site is full of case studies of companies that have reduced their image count by 60 percent. One company reduced its image count from 50 with Windows 2000 to one with Windows. That's impressive! This chapter shows you how to reap those benefits for yourself. After I briefly introduce you to disk imaging, I'll focus on how the registry fits into the disk-imaging process.

More Info
If you're interested in learning more about disk imaging, see the following resources:

• Microsoft Windows Desktop Deployment Resource Kit (Microsoft Press, 2004). This book describes how to deploy Windows XP in detail. It covers answer files, disk imaging, Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), and so on.

• Microsoft Windows Corporate Deployment Tools User's Guide. You find it in Deploy.chm, which is in the Deploy.cab cabinet file in the Support\Tools folder of your Windows CD.

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (Microsoft Press, 2005). The resource kit, of which this book is a part, contains a deployment kit for deploying Windows Server 2003 in enterprise environments.