[Question] Creating a Recovery Partition without Ghost.

[Lims]

Good evening everyone,

I'm new to the MSFN forums, but I have performed quite a bit of research before deciding to write out this post. (Not saying I didn't miss an obvious post out there.)

I work for a State Government and we have roughly 200 training workstations that will need to be reimaged between classes. We would like to attempt to create Recovery Partitions on these workstations and toggle the reimaging through a keystroke during the boot process. It isn't logical for us to haul these systems to our imaging station (17 floors above) and do to budget reasons we are trying to accomplish this without the use of Symantec Ghost or other similar commercial software.

Our Imaging Station uses Business Desktop Deployment from Microsoft. I do not believe that it has functionality to create Recovery Partitions.

So we have a great deal of hurdles, but I'm almost positive that it is possible without having to purchase and use commercial software.

I appreciate any and all input.

[Lims]

After more research I think we are going to have to utilize native windows tools; ImageX and DiskPart.

Possibly write a batch command that could be toggled during Startup?

I'm having trouble locating free alternatives to Ghost whose licensing agreements we can meet.

[jaclaz]

Maybe you missed these:

http://www.msfn.org/board/System-recovery-...ion-t84411.html

http://www.msfn.org/board/Partition-to-rei...ows-t26185.html

http://www.msfn.org/board/Disk-Imaging-Software-t100299.html

Grub4dos is a very convenient boot manager for this kind of tasks.

A smallish Winbuilder based PE + any of the freeware listed should do the job.

jaclaz