Cloning Hard Drives - Windows 7
With a baseline build and creating a baseline Acronis image, once it is rebooted do I need to do anything like run SysPrep before putting in on the pharmacological corporate network?


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In reply to PaperEater, from your… by truwrikodrorow…

Well maybe, but maybe not exactly. This is a closed training lab network with 8 computers with no access to the internet but is set up with a Windows 2008 AD domain and SQL server. So if one of the 8 workstations crashes I can quickly image it. But after I image it and reboot do I need to run sysprep before adding it to the training domain?
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The answer(s) here are very much 'It depends'...
If you are cloning each of the 8 workstations separately to their own clone drives, then you should be able to simply swap out one drive for the clone and just reboot to get back to that initial state again.
If you are cloning just 1 workstation based on the fact that all 8 workstations are identical in hardware & software, and you have a valid volume licence for the OS etc, then replacing the drive with a clone which came from a different physical source machine would still be considered to be different hardware (due to different CPU serial, motherboard, MAC address etc) and therefore even if the cloned drive boots into Windows 7 fine, there may be activation questions to answer.
I am wondering if you are also mixing up terminology here with clone and backup / imaging?
Please see KB 1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone which explains this better.
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Oh I wouldn't be surprised if I am mixing up terminology at all. You should see me try to distinguish a red wine vs. a white whine.
Any blow, the 8 computers on the training domain network has all of the same model computers with all of the same peripherals.
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