[ale] OT: NT/XP/2K/2K3 Disk Imaging

[Keith.Watson at gtri.gatech.edu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Jeff
> Hubbs
> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 05:40
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] OT: NT/XP/2K/2K3 Disk Imaging
> 
> Back in my age of pre-enlightement, the rule of thumb was that disk
> images made from one NT  (or subsequent derivative) machine could be
> installed on outwardly identical machines, but doing so was
discouraged
> because NT made installation decisions based on the hardware it saw at
> install time and that small running changes (e.g., different rev level
> within a mobo chipset) between outwardly identical machines would be
> detected at install time and different binaries would go on disk, so
as
> to result in a deviation between the OS installed on an image-created
> machine and the OS that would be there had it been installed on the
> exact same unit.  As a result, you could wind up with a machine that's
> crash-happy and you'd never be able to figure out why.
> 
> Does anyone know if this is still the case with current releases of
> Windows OSses?
> 
> As an aside, supposedly, Linux wasn't *as* susceptable to this because
> you could make allowances at kernel-config-time and beyond that, the
> kernel and modules would decide what they saw when they were first
> invoked, particularly at boot time. In other words, if you compiled an
> everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kernel and booted to it and/or started
> the modules, they would sense rev-level issues and switch themselves
> appropriately (such as the CMD640 IDE bug).
> 
> As other people have, I ask here off-topically because of the general
> sharp-cookie quotient.
> 
> Jeff

Jeff,

I've managed to get Windows 2000, XP, 2003 images that work across
multiple machines with different hardware configurations although it can
be a bit of a challenge at times. In theory if the drive controller or
ASPI configuration are different then it won't work. In practice there
are ways to get around the drive controller problem and to add new
controllers to the image. I've never found a good way around the ASPI
problem but I don't encounter the problem much as most modern
motherboards support a standard version of ASPI. Another issue is
installing a multi processor image on a single processor machine. The
solution is the install it a single processor image and then upgrade to
multiprocessor where needed.

There is a new product I just heard about, but have not tried, called
Universal Imaging Utility that claims to solve this problem.

http://www.binaryresearch.net/UIU.htm

keith


-- 

Keith R. Watson                        GTRI/ISD
Systems Support Specialist III         Georgia Tech Research Institute
keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu           Atlanta, GA  30332-0816
404-894-0836