Hardware independant imaging of XP

[bigbill2003]

Hello! Recently I have ran into a slight problem with making software images of some cookie cutter security system computers that my business is making. We only have 2 designs for our current orders and are putting out on average about 7-12 computers a week. All have the same hardware configuration with exception to the DVS cards that are in them and we need to make master images of these configurations. Now here's the real problem:

These systems are not XP Pro, they are Home edition as requested for the order (something to do with known card/software issues). And of course, you cannot use the sysprep utility on a Home system, correct? Is there a way to make a hardware independant images for a cookie cutter system?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[site3op]

There are of course hardware and software drive cloners. Just Google "harddrive cloner" for some examples. I've used Norton Ghost before and it seems to work just fine. I've also used a smaller 4 drive hardware based cloner; don't recall make/model or price though...

 

[bigbill2003]

Yeah, I suggested that to my employer but you see we are changing hardware in these every now and then and our last image (one I made from the orginal setup) was causing reboots becuase of a change in the mainboard, it wouldn't even get past the boot up screen. After running a windows repair, the problem went away, and every system done after that did the same thing. Funny, it worked on about 15 systems prior to the hardware switch. I was wondering if there is a way to strip out all of the drivers and other junk, to get a "clean" image that will work on mulitiple hardware platforms and do that with XP Home Edition.