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.