Vista Images

[mcurrie111]

Hi..I'm a support engineer for a software company, and have mainly been working with XP and Win2K3. I regularly make images of completed PC's and servers, that I can just restore on the next machine.

We now want to do the same with Vista machines, but when I build a machine with all our custom software installed, then make the image, its over 20GB big!!!! When I have a look at the details of the image, its the Vista files that are big.

When I do and XP or Win2K3 image, it squeezes it down to between 2GB and 4GB, sometimes bigger, depending on the client requirements.

What I would Like to do is get the Vista image to fit onto a DVD. Please help, any info would be greatly appreciated.

[ner]

I had the same isssued, but overcame this by making a VistaPe Disk and used Symantec Ghost to create/resture the image.... However the smallest size I could get was 5 GB

[fizban2]

20 gigs seems awefully big, our current vista image sits at 4.5 gigs, if you have the ability, you may want to look into pushing more applications through SMS or another technology, or have the a more thin install image. what all is part of your Vista image?

[waruikoohii]

The Vista image, uncompressed, is about 9-12GB (depending on if it's 32 bit or 64 bit). Compressed it's between 2.5 and 4GB.

Are you making sure to enable WIM compression? It sounds as if you aren't compressing your images.

[cluberti]

Straight Vista (depending on x86 vs x64) shouldn't be more than 8 - 9GB, and compressed they can get down under 6GB (the WIM on the x64 Vista DVD is ~3.6GB, for instance).

If you're seeing 20GB, you need to make sure you're compressing the WIM when you imagex the drive, and also you might want to test just Vista, and Vista + your software load to see where that "space" is going.

[Arrow22]

Ghost is my vote.

Been using for years with a test environment and a programming environment.

Takes 8 minutes to switch between or to start over.