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Capturing an image of a PC


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I have a PC installed and ready to be sypreped, but I ran into a little problem - I am not sure how to capture the image. I googled a few things up, but none seem to fit in my situation. I would like to avoid having to create some WinPE disk to boot from and do voodoo with, or playing with network shares (got none available for this purpose anyway). Is there an easy way to capture an image of a PC onto USB stick?

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If you want to capture it as a WIM you need two things:

1. A WinPE with Imagex on it

2. A place to put the image.

There are some WinPE builders out there that can make it for you, but you'll still need to download the WAIK.

As far as the place to put the image, it doesn't have to be a network share. You can store it on another drive like a hard drive if you want.

Other free programs that make images are Ping and a version of Acronis.

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If only I googled more and posted later :P

Eventually managed to find out pretty clear and simple enough way to copy WinPE onto prepared USB stick and add AIK tools in there, and in the end capturing the image there. Works wonders :)

I feel less stupid now.

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Ok, I am at home for a few days and only have one PC at hand. How would I capture an image of virtual machine? I am using VirtualBox. Any ideas?

I gave up trying to figure that one out. I could never get a VM to do a PXE boot, so I do all my work on actual hardware. :blushing:

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create a ISO of your boot media. Boot from the ISO and either connect ot a network share form the VM, or connect a USB hard drive to the VM then capture the image to that device/connection.

I don't use virtual box so I don't know if this is possible with virtualbox, but with VMWare and Virtual PC there are ways to mount the Virtual Disk as a hard drive and then you can capture the image from the captured drive to your image.

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