Tools to deploy a sysprep image

[andymitchell]

Does anyone know of any good deployment tools that i can use to deploy my sysprep image. I'm using ghost which works fine but i am using it within my workplace and the ghost licensing means i have to buy 1 license per machine i image. We sell the PC's on as part of our equipment so i only ever deploy the image once on each PC. This makes it a very expensive way to do it as we need to deploy the same image about 800 times a year. I'm looking for either a free tool, or one that i can pay for that doesnt require a license per image deployed. It ideally needs to be a DOS command line utility.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Alanoll]

Well...

I've been experimenting with imagex.exe from Microsoft for my college's system deployments. You could also use SelfImage which is open source....

[andymitchell]

They both look ok, but neither appears to run from a DOS boot disk. for the restore i wanted to create a simple batch file menu front end to select from 1 or 2 different images.

[RickSteele]

Go here:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

I've been using their products for 5 years and have never looked back; inexpensive, volume licensing, extremely good support, dedicated newsgroup and very accurate. You will not be disappointed.

Edited August 22, 2007 by RickSteele

[vanbc]

Why not go with seagate drives and use DiscWizard.

Seagate now has the Acronis tool in discwizard.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000dd04090aRCRD

[bj-kaiser]

They both look ok, but neither appears to run from a DOS boot disk. for the restore i wanted to create a simple batch file menu front end to select from 1 or 2 different images.

imagex.exe is a Windows application, right. But for that reason there is Windows PE 2.0 (contained in the freely available WAIK). It is bootable from USB, CD, Net and whatnot and is basically a boiled down Vista.

If you have a environment that would allow you to use PXE (which requires at least DHCP and TFTP services on your network) you are good to go with Windows PE. I have to admit booting Windows PE from the net is way slower than booting a DOS floppy image, since the floppy is only 1.44 MB and is downloaded instantly to RAM where Windows PE needs 100 MB (my average build) to load. But you get a complete Windows system running from RAM.