We are rolling out a new Finance system and the whole company needs training on it. Ive been tasked with recycling about a 100 old laptops into training machines. We dont have a ghost server. and they wont sign off the budget for Ghost does anyone use any good open source alternatives.

Build one up as an Ubuntu Linux machine and use the command line tool dd to duplicate the disks.

Or use a Mac if you have one to hand?

Rachel

do you have any budget?

could you buy a disk cloner?

quick google turned up clonezilla… never used it personally; we’ve got a hardware clone tool that you plug sata hdds in to.

clonezilla worked fine for me.

However, be very careful about settings that are hard drive specific and making sure you don’t tick any options to copy them to hard drives that are even slightly different.

Basically, unless all laptops are 100% identical and have the same size disk, to be safe, only copy the partitions across, don’t copy a full disk unless you understand exactly what you’re doing – I had to waste a stressful hour or two of sorting out the fact that my brand new 300mb disk thought it was only 80mb in size!

I used this a couple of weeks ago and it cloned the drives just fine.

EaseUS® Todo Backup Free

used version 2.5.1, but version 3 is now out. Just google it.

re: the post above. This one will increase the partition to fill the disk if you go from 80Gb to 300GB for example.

http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-SE.php

Assuming the laptops are the same spec/model, install OS/software on one, then use Clonezilla to distribute.

Works very well 🙂

Just make sure you’ve got a fast network, or it might take quite a while!

Assuming laptops are same model etc, maybe try an ASR combined with sysprep to keep the SIDs unique

for the people that use CloneZilla
Is it easy enough to use the server edition. I will be using a OLD server and CAT6 Switch we have lieing around as the base. We only have 2 Laptop models so should be ok with that. It doesnt say anywhere on the site how to kick off the restore on the client. is it just a case of running the live CD or am i missing something?

Gosh, is Ghost still going?

Ok, cost up the price of the server you want. Cost up the price of labour to do it all manually. Show the boss, get your own way. </BOFH>

I’ve never used it myself, but this looks like what you need, for free. http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/373

Easeus is excellent, but I’m not sure as I’d want to use it to manually clone a hundred disks.

Used CLonezilla before it’s alright.

Theres always WDS (Windows Deployment Services)
http://blog.augustoalvarez.com.ar/2010/04/20/deploying-windows-7-using-windows-deployment-services-wds-step-by-step-part-i/