Drive Imaging

What are people using these days?

In the past, old version of Ghost + BartPE + NewSID has been the go, but that's no longer suitable in the days of Win7. The problem I seem to be striking is that the home stuff is too limited, and the enterprise stuff is too....enterprisey.

All I want to be able to do is boot off a USB drive (since none of our workstations have optical), and create/restore the images to either USB or network.

Any suggestions that do just that, support Win7, and aren't going to cost me a huge amount of money like most of the enterprise crap seems to?

Edit: Commercial is fine, and also eventually I'll go for the Windows Deployment Server stuff, but I simply don't have time to set that up right now.

Umm Symantec Ghost works for Win 7, but not v8.x .

ive just started making a winpe usb boot image to do stuff like this but theres linux ones that do it too...

or you could make a usb bartpe one?

Got USB BartPE, but can't get anything newer than Ghost 8 on it, which doesn't support 7.

Looks like WDS is the way to go, since it seems it actually only takes like 10mins to set up, once you dig out a nice easy tutorial rather than trying to figure it out via MS documents, :>

Is WDS the network thing? I've got 50 PCs arriving at the end of the week and apparently we just stick a USB key in and away they go... no idea how but i'm sure i'll see soon!

Wouldn't WDS be PXE boot like RIS was? Then you wouldn't even need a USB key.

Yeah Windows Deployment Services is the replacement for RIS. It's considerably nicer and far easier to setup, esp. once I found a guide that wasn't written in moon language.

And yeah PXE boot.

Nah these PCs dont have PXE on the bios, I mean yes it would be a PXE client on a USB key....

Really? Just about everything made in the last 10 years can do it in my experience.

Some of the older machines here I had to find the "LAN ROM OPTION" and enable it in BIOS, save and reboot, then I could go back in and add network into the boot sequence.

Got a link to USB PXE client tho? Got one machine with a dead onboard port that wont PXE from the PCI card :/

Why don't you just d/load GSS 2.5 and create a WinPE USB boot disk that'll connect to a ghostcast server across the network or just a mapped drive.

Or if your not provisioning you can use a virtual partition, the machine will reboot to that run the imaging session then reboot to the original or new OS.

Yeah it would have to be. RIS was a prize cunt

Mainly because being for work, I'm loathe to pirate it, and paying for it is prohibitively expensive. That, and WDS is up and working now

PXE boot > get presented with 3 options:
*Capture Image
-Sucks images onto server
*Windows Setup (x86)
*Windows Setup (x64)
-Choose between installing bare Win7, or my base image with Office/printer drivers/Google Pack (FF/Acrobat reader/G-Earth/Picasa)

All I have to do to prep the reference system for capture is run sysprep, which consists of ticking one box and hitting OK.