How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?
Q&A
Great article on customising the Acer Aspire One UI, but what schools need is a way of producing a standard image, after all of the tweaks have been done, that can be copied to the machines.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/04/acer_aspire_one_ui_fiddling/
Imaging our 200 Macs is easy as pie but it would be a pain to have to set up each AA1 - that we would very much like to buy - on its own.
Any ideas how we could achieve this?
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
title
We use PING, as suggested by Tony, though to be honest it is somewhat clunky (e.g. its tendency to scrawl stderr messages over the top of its own dialogues). PING also has problems with LVM volumes, and I have found that it fails to restore disk labels on swapfile volumes (so your restored image will probably end up running without swap).
I haven't tried Clonezilla yet but it's definitely on my todo list. As another partimage-based distro I would expect it to be at least as capable as PING, and it claims to support more ghost-like features such as multicast restores.
Norton Ghost
Norton Ghost normally tends to be a popular option, it was certainly heavily used during my period of working for IT Services at my university.
@Simon
I'd recommend taking a look at PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost), which is a tiny linux distro and disk back-up/restore app that can be downloaded and burned to CD or run off a server.
http://ping.windowsdream.com/
Boot off the burned CD - or a suitable set-up USB stick or drive - and copy the entire AA1 disk to a back-up drive or a machine on the network. You can then use PING to restore this image to all the other machines.
This is how I back-up my own AA1 against the inevitable.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
