FatTwinkie

Howdy guys.

Well, I know that the old way to re-image a computer was to reformat the drive with the original Windows OS disc and just reinstall Windows. However at my tech school at the end of every year, they say they have to re image all the computers but I never see an IT guy come in with a Windows OS disc.

Is there another way to re image a computer without needing the Windows OS disc?

kris23

i believe it can be done through the LAN, allowing all systems to boot off the same thing

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Chaos

or they may just have Ghost images to restore systems to the original state

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Tipstaff

Just to clarify:

What you've mentioned, FatTwinkie, is actually a reinstall. What was mentioned by kris23 and Chaos is a true way of re-imaging.

Using a program like Ghost, Acronis True Image, or the like, you can create a snapshot or image of the machine at whatever time you want. The benefit is that you have a backup of your system at the time it was imaged, so if you ever want reinstall your system, you don't have to. Just use that snapshot/image, and you can have your system up and running, all the applications, drivers, and updates that you had done at the time you created that file, and it's all done within minutes rather than hours.

In the case of the school, one would assume that they have dozens of identical machines, where the components are all the same. What this allows them to do is have 1 image that includes all the applications they need, but for multiple computers. To put it even simpler, to reinstall 20 machines from scratch would take days, while with an image that works on all 20 machines would take minutes to maybe an hour to redo. They could have physical copies of the image on a DVD, locally on each computer in a hidden partition, or have a bootdisc that grabs the image from a remote location, such as another machine, maybe a server, that has the image located on it's hard drive. Also, there are ways for administrators to "push" an image through the network back onto whatever machine they want to, or have a machine initiate a re-imaging process via a simple command, so they don't even need to be physically at the machine in order to re-image it. It can all be done remotely.

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DJ BIG T

welcome to DH Fat!!!!

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jandarsun8

Greetings and as Tipstaff has mentioned, a re-image generally means using Ghost or some others means to load an image quickly where as what your talking about is a re-install.

To clarify what an image is, an image is a machine that you install every app that you need on it: Office, Adobe Reader, Windows updates/SP's (which can take forever on a fresh install) maybe a VPN solution and once that's done you run Sysprep on it which removes the SID id of that machine. At the point you reboot and using a image utility on reboot you take your "snap shot". Once your snap shot is taken, you can have a new machine fully loaded back up and running with in a half hour 45 minutes with out having to install anything.

To add a little bit on what Tip has already said, programs like Alteris can push out a image if it's set up correctly.

We are using a program called UIU (Universal Imaging Utilitie) at work that allows us to incorporate all of the drivers for all of our Dells regardless of what make or model, laptop- desktop, doesn't matter. This allows us to only need one or two images available for our 400+ machines and makes things a whole lot easier.

Since everyone is on roaming profiles and everyone has a standard build (well except for the engineering guys) if a machine gets infected with a virus we don't even bother to clean it. We tell them to take a early lunch and just push out an image to it. The time it takes to clean it compared to pushing down an image that we might have to do anyway is just faster and easier.

Hope that builds on what Tipstaff has mentioned already and some more understanding of what it is.

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MitchRapp

we ghost our images via network at my company
so yea fun