Answers to “How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?” • Register Hardware

Answers to: How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?

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Norton Ghost #

By Sandeep Jassal Posted Monday 8th December 2008 09:46 GMT

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 #

By Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware Posted Monday 8th December 2008 09:53 GMT

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.

title #

By Nick L Posted Monday 8th December 2008 12:59 GMT

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.