Windows XP Recovery Disk Question

Hi Comrades,

I am new to the boards so hello! I hope I can be of use to somebody one day.

Now please forgive me I was brought up on Apple as a kid so my knowledge of Windows is OK but not near as good as my UNIX skills.....

So here is the situation.....

We have a "Training Centre", 8 Computers running XP SP 3. Part of most of our training courses is for the trainee to install the software we make, so as you can imagine it's quite a task to manually remove the software on every computer (which includes deleting some registry entries) after the course finishes.

So what are my best options? Recovery Disk? Make a Disk Image?

This is what state I need the computer to be in post "recovery"

- All drivers installed

- MS Office, Adobe Reader installed

- MYSQL database installed.

- Retain user account information e.g. Training Machine 2 (with desktop background etc)


All the training computers are just Dell optiplex's and are same spec.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

My first thought, if I understand correctly, would me to use something like Norton Ghost (or the likes) to create an image of each computer before "classes". When all done with for that course and the computers need to be returned to original state, restore them from the "ghosted" image.

 

Hi Tux_Rules (he certainly does)

Thanks for your reply, sorry to sound a bit dumb but as I mentioned I am not amazing with windows.

So I create a cloned disk lets say I whack the clone on a nice little 2.5" SATA which is sitting in a USB caddy, using norton ghost.

What would be my next step go round each computer (which presumeably has norton ghost installed and restore from the image on the HDD?)

How long does this typically take? Does it ghost the whole drive and on the restore is it incremental i.e. the windows partition?

My only thoughts are that this could take a while especially via USB?

Cheers

 

It would take a while, and can be done via networking. If I remember correctly, with the older version of ghost (2003 or older), only the computer holding the backups needed to have ghost installed, and a floppy for the rest (network backup). It could be time consuming and this is just the first thing I could think of as this is how I did my backup. It can be done incremental if I again remember correctly (separate partitions). There are though most likely other solutions out there that may work better in your case, but this was how the college that I had attended in 2000 did it. If time is an issue (depending on the volume size, could take maybe an hour per workstation), it may not be your best option.

I'm sure someone else will post with another option as well, but you could explore the Ghost idea as well.

 

Thanks Tux