Image Software

[omg its nlm]

Image Software
I build a few laptops a day. I just put XP SP2 Driver updates and Office 2K3 on it. What would be the best software out there to send an Image to it. I know about Ghost but it looks like I need a license per PC so that could get spendy. Any Ideas?

Thanks
Nate

 

[kcnychief]

I would like to put my .02 in behind Ghost, and Acronis products. They are both very high quality.

Obviously cost is something to keep in mind, but you get what you pay for.

Thread Moved

 

[omg its nlm]

Yeah I was thinking about the Acronis products. I will have to take a look at them more.

Thanks

 

[kcnychief]

In a nutshell, the biggest differences is that Acronis lets you do a full backup from within Windows. It has the ability to unlock files as needed so the machine doesn't actually have to come down (get rebooted) to make a full backup.

Not really applicable to a workstation, but I also like the feature of being able to run the system off a CD while doing a restore. I have used this for servers before whereas critical services such as ADUC, DHCP, DNS etc - can all still run from an image-based CD while the actual machine itself is still being restored.

 

[NetRyder]

I've used Acronis TrueImage in the past, and it works well.

Planning to try out DriveImage XML as a free alternative soon.
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

 

[omg its nlm]

Wow Acronis gets spendy. Ghost is a lot cheeper.

 

[omg its nlm]

Any one else?

Thanks

 

[lancer]

not to hijack this post, but is there a way to make a drive image of linux from within linux and then port it somehow to work with vmware on a pc?

 

[fitz]

not to hijack this post, but is there a way to make a drive image of linux from within linux and then port it somehow to work with vmware on a pc?

Hard to take an image from a live running system (files in use and all that jazz). Far easier to boot off a boot disk and take an image and pull that image into VMware using ghost or TrueImage.

You could boot the source machine off a linux live distro (Knoppix, etc). and run a dd image of the source comp. then boot the VM Guest off the live CD and import the dd image into the VM. May have to deal with the hardware change issues.

Any one else?

Thanks

I think Ghost and TrueImage are probably the most popular/useable drive imaging products. It used to be ghost and PowerQuest's Drive Image, but then Symantec bought Drive Image.

There are some smaller drive cloning/imaging products.. but I have never used them.

Drive Image (for windows or linux)
DriveImageXML
R-Drive Image

There are other options out there. But again, I have never used them as Ghost and/or TrueImage are really considered the "class" of the drive imaging field.

 

[kcnychief]

not to hijack this post, but is there a way to make a drive image of linux from within linux and then port it somehow to work with vmware on a pc?

Possible for Windows, but I haven't seen a Linux compatible version yet - check this out from VMWare

http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/converter/

 

[lancer]

it looks like just the thing, but it doesn't seem to support linux conversions.