A Products such a DriveImage from PowerQuest and Ghost from Ghost Software (see review on page 54) will make a complete image of one computer's hard drive and allow you to copy it to another. This is a simple way to set up a large number of identical computers with Windows 95 or Windows 3.x. However, Windows NT is less straightforward.
During the NT setup process, the installation program assigns each computer a Security Identification number (SID). Every SID on a network must be unique. When you clone an NT workstation, every computer on your network will end up having the same SID. To work around this problem, Ghost comes with a companion program called Ghost Walker which allows you to generate a unique SID retrospectively for each computer on your network.
I compared notes with a number of Windows NT workstation administrators who had done, or were in the process of doing, a large-scale rollout. They had all found that using the tools for automating installation provided by Microsoft they could set up an unattended installation. This approach has a number of advantages. Firstly, if there are unique settings for each computer, such as the computer name and IP address, or if specific device drivers are required, an unattend.txt file can be used to cater for these differences. Secondly, this approach simplifies the setup of applications that support scripted installation, and for those that don't, a utility called sysdiff.exe can be used to create a difference file between a reference computer and the target computer. This difference file can then be applied to the target computer. It may take several days to set up and test this type of installation process, but the actual installation can be performed with minimal user intervention. Also, what you learn from the procedure can be applied to automating further upgrades of your computers, saving you time in the future.
This automated approach to installing NT on multiple computers is detailed in the Windows NT Workstation Resource Kit (available from Microsoft and most computer bookstores). Sysdiff.exe is included on the Windows NT Workstation CD.
- Roy Chambers