I am about to have to completely wipe and rebuild all of our training machines (15 right now), so the easy way of going about it is to get one machine exactly how I want it and then clone that machine to the other machines. I have used commercial options in the past, but quite frankly I have found them to be so ‘featureful’ that they are overly complex and do not work as advertised. So this time I am going to go with the open source variety, ODIN.
I have not tried this program yet, but the features are exactly in tune with what I am looking for:
- Backup and restore of complete hard drive
- Lightweight, no installation required
- Runs from Windows PE (i.e. BartPE)
I am hopeful this will save me tons of time and be a simple way to roll out images to new or corrupted machines. On that note, if anyone has tried ODIN, please post your experience below.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
I was planning to re-install one of my machines, I will try this out this weekend.
Training machines?
Yes. When we do training for people at our facility, we provide PC’s.
Nice simple gui, single executable. It makes since if you are using bart-pe. I,ve been happy with knoppix and partimage.Partimage has a
text interface or can be used as cml. The features seem to be very similar. hummmm
DriveImage XML
http://www.techsupportalert.com/partitioning-hard-drives-3.htm
.
DriveImage XML is only licensed for private use, otherwise you have to purchase a commercial license.
i haven’t tried odin before, but clonezilla is the bees knees when it comes to what you’re wanting to do.
Hope you`ve read this bit at the bottom:
“Warning
This program is still in an early stage of development and currently not intended for productive use. Do not use this program as your only means to backup your data at this time!!! Any use is at your own risk.”
I like BootIt NG. Works good.