How? - Cloning a fresh install of OS

[Richie]

I really would like your expert input please.
I am fed up with reinstalling my Win XP Pro OS then setting it all up how I like it, then installing drivers, software etc. It takes me 2 days at least and I have a couple of PC's to do sometimes.
I bought a 60gig USB portable drive recently so I could install the OS and programs on it then when I need to do a reinstall on any of my PC's, hopefully, I just clone the stuff.
I partition my PC's so that the OS is on one partition and programs are on another.
Could you walkme through formatting PC and copying from portable to PC hard drive please?
I have Drive Image 7
What I can't figure is:
If I have a bare hard drive how can I get the PC to see the portable drive?
The hardware on each PC is different. Will that matter? I guess when I have the OS on and fire it up hardware will be recognized and drivers installed?
Thanks for your help
PC manufacturers must be doing this all the time I guess.

 

[Inaris]

well, I'm not a user of drivemage so I'm not going to help you there.
I'm sure several other will be able to assist you on that.
as for how the vendors do it, they use a tool called sysprep that setups the system for deployment. Then capture the whole systemdrive using a full clone of the drive to image. The images are then used to reimage the other drives in mass numbers...
This can be applied to what you want to do as well, only in a simplier manner.
As I said I don't use drive image, so I'm not going to give you much for releiable info on that, but it comes to this...
The program you boot with will need native USB support/drives. Then you will clone the drive from your system to the external enclosure. (at least this is what I'm suspecting you are wanting) I would actually create an image file instead, but that is me. the task is just reversed when you want to get the data back. if you do this every 2 weeks, you are pretty safe as far as keeping your image/backup current.
hope you find the help you need and good luck

 

[Osiris]

What you need to do is set you OS the way you want it, get a dvd burner and burn everything use Norton Ghost or something similiar and you want have to go thru that again.

 

[Seiken]

So Norton Ghost?
What exactly does it create? A mirror of the hard drive state or some type of massive file that needs to be ran/extracted to get the original state back?

 

[Inaris]

well, ghost has the options for both. You can clode the drive over to another or create the images. Ghost spanns the images into 2gb files, so if you have 10gb of data, you get 5 files all about 2 gb each.
Drive image I would suspect to work the same.

 

[Seiken]

Cool. So instead of formatting and reinstalling the OS, you could overwrite your current state with a previous one created by Ghost having the same effect as a clean reinstall?

 

[Inaris]

yup. That is the case. Pretty cool huh?

 

[Seiken]

Awesome! I'm gonna have to grab myself a copy!

 

[SHAWN]

I have a dos version of ghost that you boot off of and you can sector copy 1 drive to the other . Ghost is cool

 

[IBMan]

yes, ghost is a very useful tool