Laptop HD Cloning

[hyphven]

I have a lab of 20 Thinkpad R40's and I am trying to put the same HD image on each one. I have a 2.5" HD to IDE cable connector and I have been trying to clone with norton ghost. I can get all the data on one HD but when I try to start up the finished laptop it just hangs at start up. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[mpjesse]

Interesting... do all the laptops have the same hard drive manufacturer? It shouldn't make a difference, but laptops are finicky.

I replaced a mobo in a laptop once (I think it was a Dell Inspiron 6100 or something). The new motherboard was nearly identical to the old one, yet the processor wouldn't work in it (actually it did, but the BIOS told me it didn't). Anyways, I had to buy a processor that was 50mhz faster to get it to work. Both processors were identical save the clock speed difference.

Retarded huh?

-mpjesse

 

[nanoprobs]

How did u clone it?? did u take the master H.D plug it into the 2.5"->IDE converter and clone it using a desktop? did u use DOS clonning? or did u use ghost in window??

What i would do is connect the (master) laptop H.D to the IDE converter, then plug it into a desktop, use norton ghost boot disk to clone this (master) H.D to another H.D (formated with FAT32) as an image file. Then all u got to do is take another laptop hard drive plug it in and clone it from the image file to the laoptop H.D. That is if all of your 20 laptop are the same model, also you might want to reseal your OS before you ghost it to a image file. Of course there is another way, if your laptop have a dvd writer then all you have to do is put the ghost bootdisk in that laptop, put a blank DVD into the laptop dvd writer and you can save the image file to the DVD disc. After that just take the DVD disc and use it to ghost it to all other laptops.

 

[hyphven]

I think I may have found a solution. I used Ghost on a boot disk and made an image file and burned it some CD's. I did not have a DVD burner on that workstation, It fit on 4 CD's. But the system booted up on the laptop. Will I have issues when I put the working, cloned HD in a different lap top?

All of the workstation are exactly the same. HD, MB and everything. I did this on the laptop itself, not a desktop. Thanks for your help guys. I really appreciate it.