[OPLINTECH] Cloning Computers?

Tue Jun 18 10:19:15 EDT 2013

Michael
I've been using Clonezilla live CD and/or server for about 5 years with really good success. The advantages are that it's free, well documented, and easy to use (basically you have to hit the enter key 12 times).
The disadvantage, and this is with most clone programs, is that the computers you're cloning have to be pretty identical, and the "tech" computer should be built with a hard drive smaller than the target computers (unless like in your case all the computers are identical).
What you will need:
-- A blank CD and some image burning software
-- The Clonezilla live CD
	http://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/
-- An external hard drive to store your image. I use a 500 gig Passport, but you can build one with a case and an old 80 gig if you're not planning on saving a lot of images.
-- The ability to change the bios or to boot from a CD
Getting started (Four to five hours)
-- Build the "tech" computer with all the users, all the apps, all the updates. 
-- Don't license the tech computer or run any security software
-- You can take some shortcuts like with the computer name i.e. circ_01 and using a static IP. This makes renaming the client computers easier.
Cloning
-- Attach the external hard drive to the tech computer
-- Boot the tech computer from the Clonezilla CD
-- Follow the prompts to create an image
-- Give your image a really good name like d600-staff-win7-250g.img You do this by just backspacing over the default image name.
-- This process should take between 15 minutes and half an hour
Restoring
-- Attach the external hard drive to the client computer
-- Boot from the Clonezilla live CD
-- Choose "restore an image"
--Choose your image name
-- Follow the prompts and affirm that you're replacing the software on the disk with the image
-- Again this process should take between 15 minutes and half an hour

So if you give yourself a day and a half you should now have 12 identical computers. Next you'll want to rename them, change the static IP, and license your software. Budget 5 or 6 hours to build the tech computer, and 30 minutes each for the clients. Total investment, if you had to buy an external hard drive and a pack of CDs around $50.

In our environment we use the Clonezilla live CD to do one-up restores i.e. copy public-01 and replace hard drive in public-02. For larger projects we use Clonezilla Server Edition running on a Suse workstation and clone a dozen clients at once. Here the math gets really good because the tech computer is 5 or 6 hours but you're doing a dozen clients in 30 minutes.

Please feel free to contact me or come on down to Xenia if you need any help with this project

Jim Mann
Technology Coordinator
Greene County Public Library
76 E. Market St
Xenia OH 45385
937 352 4000 x1210
Discover. Learn. Grow.
jmann at gcpl.lib.oh.us

-----Original Message-----
From: oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org [mailto:oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org] On Behalf Of Michael Vollmar-Grone
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 8:20 AM
To: oplintech at lists.oplin.org
Subject: [OPLINTECH] Cloning Computers?

I have a dozen new Win7 Pro computers used primarily for circulation to load and configure.
Have read about ghosting/cloning but no hands-on experience.
Any advice how to proceed (or not), recommended software, etc appreciated.
Mike

-- 

Michael Vollmar-Grone
Director of Technical Services
Shelby County Libraries
230 East North Street
Sidney, OH 45365
(937) 492-6851 x.119
http://shelbyco.lib.oh.us/
http://www.facebook.com/ShelbyCountyLibraries
vollmami at oplin.org

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