[dba-Tech] Windows XP repair on a Ghosted drive

Steve Erbach erbachs at gmail.com
Mon Feb 13 15:45:02 CST 2006


Answered my own question, more or less.  After re-installing Windows
through the Repair option on the Windows XP CD and re-installing all
39 of the blankety blank XP updates, I found something in the "Windows
XP Cookbook" by Allen and Gralla.

The "recipe" involved cloning a Windows system.  I'm sure that anyone
here that manages an s-load of identical workstations in a big company
knows about this. From "Windows XP Cookbook:"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Use SYSPREP to accomplish this. First, configure and arrange the
initial machine as you like it, using the local administrator account.
Then:

Create a new local administrator. See Chapter 15 for instructions on
creating local users.

Log out of the local administrator account and log in to the new
account you created.

Navigate to the System applet inside Control Panel. Under the Advanced
tab, click the User Profiles button.

Select the one called Administrator that has the local machine's name
in it, and click Copy To.

Click Change in the Permitted to Use section.

Select Everyone in the list. This gives permission for anybody logged
into the computer to use the contents of the profile. Click OK.

Click OK to get out of the Copy To dialog box.

Finally, copy the contents of the Documents and Settings\Administrator
folder to Documents and Settings\Default Users. Ensure that you are
displaying hidden files and folders so that you copy all configuration
files.

Now, run SYSPREP with the following command:

> sysprep -reseal -quiet -mini -pnp


SYSPREP will strip the SIDs off the system, scrub any personal
identifying information from the image, and then shut down the
machine. From that point, use a drive copying utility to move the
images to multiple machines.

Once the copy is complete, reboot the computer without the floppy and
proceed through mini-Setup again, so that all personal information can
be restored and new SIDs can be generated. Do this on the cloned
computers and the original "prototype" computer.

Discussion

Products like Symantec Ghost are often the quickest way to lay down an
image of a drive onto multiple systems at once. The downside is that
by taking what amounts to a photograph of a machine, any security
identifiers (SIDs) that are stored on the machine are replicated in
that image to other machines. The result would be multiple machines
with identical SIDs, which can cause a lot of problems on your
network.

Ghost and DriveImage have SID generators built in, but Microsoft
doesn't support that. The company wants you to use SYSPREP instead,
which scrubs SIDs from an image in a supported fashion so that you can
clone a machine easily.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not sure that the ailing hard disk on that system would have
survived long enough (it's pretty much toast now), but I'm glad to
know how to get Windows working properly on a cloned drive.

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI

On 2/8/06, Steve Erbach <erbachs at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Group,
>
> I'm just checking up to make sure my conceptions about how to do this
> are in the ballpark.
>
> My wife's PC has two 160 GB drives, each one divided into two
> partitions.  We use Norton Ghost to backup the main 160 GB drive to
> the additional drive.  Windows sees the drives as C and D on the main
> device, and E and F on the additional drive.



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