How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?
Great article on customising the Acer Aspire One UI, but what schools need is a way of producing a standard image, after all of the tweaks have been done, that can be copied to the machines.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/04/acer_aspire_one_ui_fiddling/
Imaging our 200 Macs is easy as pie but it would be a pain to have to …
I'd recommend taking a look at PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost), which is a tiny linux distro and disk back-up/restore app that can be downloaded and burned to CD or run off a server.
http://ping.windowsdream.com/
Boot off the burned CD - or a suitable set-up USB stick or drive - and copy the entire AA1 disk to a back-up drive or a machine on the network. You can then use PING to restore this image to all the other machines.
This is how I back-up my own AA1 against the inevitable.
We use PING, as suggested by Tony, though to be honest it is somewhat clunky (e.g. its tendency to scrawl stderr messages over the top of its own dialogues). PING also has problems with LVM volumes, and I have found that it fails to restore disk labels on swapfile volumes (so your restored image will probably end up running without swap).
I haven't tried Clonezilla yet but it's definitely on my todo list. As another partimage-based distro I would expect it to be at least as capable as PING, and it claims to support more ghost-like features such as multicast restores.
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How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?
Great article on customising the Acer Aspire One UI, but what schools need is a way of producing a standard image, after all of the tweaks have been done, that can be copied to the machines. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/04/acer_aspire_one_ui_fiddling/ Imaging our 200 Macs is easy as pie but it would be a pain to have to …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Posted Monday 8th December 2008 10:01 GMT
Sandeep Jassal
Norton Ghost #
Norton Ghost normally tends to be a popular option, it was certainly heavily used during my period of working for IT Services at my university.
Posted Monday 8th December 2008 10:01 GMT
Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware
@Simon #
I'd recommend taking a look at PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost), which is a tiny linux distro and disk back-up/restore app that can be downloaded and burned to CD or run off a server.
http://ping.windowsdream.com/
Boot off the burned CD - or a suitable set-up USB stick or drive - and copy the entire AA1 disk to a back-up drive or a machine on the network. You can then use PING to restore this image to all the other machines.
This is how I back-up my own AA1 against the inevitable.
Posted Monday 8th December 2008 13:57 GMT
Nick L
title #
We use PING, as suggested by Tony, though to be honest it is somewhat clunky (e.g. its tendency to scrawl stderr messages over the top of its own dialogues). PING also has problems with LVM volumes, and I have found that it fails to restore disk labels on swapfile volumes (so your restored image will probably end up running without swap).
I haven't tried Clonezilla yet but it's definitely on my todo list. As another partimage-based distro I would expect it to be at least as capable as PING, and it claims to support more ghost-like features such as multicast restores.
This topic is closed for new posts.