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i think you are looking for ping
http://ping.windowsdream.com/

or g4u
or CloneZilla
or dd > gzip > ftp (which is what g4u does, actually).

i think you are looking for ping http://ping.windowsdream.com/

I was in a very similar situation as OP and found PING very helpful. It doesn't provide any automated way of creating a recovery partition, but the documentation does explain how to make automated system restore discs. The principle is nearly the same, so adapting it shouldn't be too hard.

Off the cuff, I imagine it would go like this:

• Deploy a clonezilla image to a host machine
• Create a recovery partition with gparted or similar. The recovery partition need only be about 30-40% of the total occupied space of the system partition (thanks gzip!)
• Install PING to the recovery partition. I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader.
• Install GRUB to the MBR, creating entries for Windows and PING's kernel
• Create a system restore image with PING and save it to the recovery partition
• Tweak the KERNEL line in GRUB with the appropriate automation. The PING documentation is very helpful with this (see above link)
• Once you have everything set up just right, you can then create a master clonezilla image of the entire hard disk to deploy to identical machines.

The main downside to this is it relies on GRUB, which may not be desirable to your customers. It's also tedious to set up.

It's really worth mentioning that creating an automated restore disc is much easier.

I was in a very similar situation as OP and found PING very helpful. It doesn't provide any automated way of creating a recovery partition, but the documentation does explain how to make automated system restore discs. The principle is nearly the same, so adapting it shouldn't be too hard.

Off the cuff, I imagine it would go like this:

• Deploy a clonezilla image to a host machine
• Create a recovery partition with gparted or similar. The recovery partition need only be about 30-40% of the total occupied space of the system partition (thanks gzip!)
• Install PING to the recovery partition. I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader.
• Install GRUB to the MBR, creating entries for Windows and PING's kernel
• Create a system restore image with PING and save it to the recovery partition
• Tweak the KERNEL line in GRUB with the appropriate automation. The PING documentation is very helpful with this (see above link)
• Once you have everything set up just right, you can then create a master clonezilla image of the entire hard disk to deploy to identical machines.

The main downside to this is it relies on GRUB, which may not be desirable to your customers. It's also tedious to set up.

It's really worth mentioning that creating an automated restore disc is much easier.

(PING) works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.

Personally, I beg to differ. PING is great if you're on a threadbare-shoestring budget and don't mind the 'minimalist' (and there I'm being generous) UI. It does do disk imaging well, but I find Acronis True Image to be worth the $40 they ask for it. In addition to Acronis being able to pull double duty and both do disk imaging and data backups, it's really nice in that images can be mounted and browsed like regular disk drives. This is a functionality that PING presently does not support, but has been invaluable in my travels, and you can't compare its MUCH friendlier GUI to PING.

No, I don't work for Acronis, but Acronis products do work very well for me.

Uhhh... These are desktop PCs? You specified "laptop" in your first sentence, so I would have thought you'd specify it further down if that's what you meant. There's no reason to have user data stored on the local machine at all. All it does is needlessly choke up bandwidth when synchronising (you do sync it with the server, right? Or do you have some other backup mechanism in place?).

My bad. At the hospital we use Desktop PC's except for the areas where we need mobility and we use laptops on rolling carts and more recently the Pellham Sloane PC's on Howard Medical mobility carts with built-in batteries.

For those machines, we're using an application called Cerner which is a web-accessible, citrix application with the hosting computers (and all the data and the backups, and everything) located at the remote facility. So there is no need for the nurses and the doctors to have anything saved on those machines be they the desktops at the observation areas and nursing stations, or on the mobile units.

The administrators on the other hand need things like Office and have non-EPHI data stored on their local machines. We encourage placing the data on the RAID where it'll be protected and backed up...but some just do not and thanks to the administration, this is not something we can force.

As for the rest? Well done, you've started taking system images instead of reloading all of the patches, drivers, and necessary software for every build. Save yourself a little time and do the same thing with your home PC with PING

Already using it at home and on the servers at the hopsital. It works, it works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.

For administration PC's, it's a bit longer. I have to backup their data first and then slick and reload. Then I have to put the data back. So that's more in the 30-90 minutes category.

Uhhh... These are desktop PCs? You specified "laptop" in your first sentence, so I would have thought you'd specify it further down if that's what you meant. There's no reason to have user data stored on the local machine at all. All it does is needlessly choke up bandwidth when synchronising (you do sync it with the server, right? Or do you have some other backup mechanism in place?).

As for the rest? Well done, you've started taking system images instead of reloading all of the patches, drivers, and necessary software for every build. Save yourself a little time and do the same thing with your home PC with PING

See Partimage Is Not Ghost

As to goal... I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC

Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.

If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.

You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)

My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis or PING. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.

You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.

My solution to malware: throw combofix at it
My solution to reinstalls: Do it once, then use Partimage Is Not Ghost to create an image. Then re-image in 10 minutes when needed.

http://ping.windowsdream.com/ Works great!

Try PING (PartImage is Not Ghost) -- ping.windowsdream.com

Very flexible, lots of driver support, backup from/to CD, HDD, USB drive, FTP or network share, and GPL'ed. Active forum, too.

Check out the GParted Live CD. http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/
Its a nice Partition magic clone. I've been using it recently instead of windows own disk management

After dd is done, remove A, replace with B, then boot off the gparted cd. Fix the partition size and make sure it is bootable.

If using dd doesn't work check out PING (Partimage is not Ghost) http://ping.windowsdream.com/
I don't think it can image from 1 disk directly to another, but you could make an image of drive A and save it on a third drive. Then restore from the image to drive B. A bit more work, so try the dd method first

Everyone who wants to have Ghosting ability, check out Partimage Is Not Ghost . This is a very good piece of software that creates hdd backups reliably (in my usage) of ntfs, fat, and any *nix formats. It boots from a cd and runs on linux.

Another favored find I have made recently is XOSL . Yes, I know, it is old, but it is still good.

Thanks for the recommendation. Took me a little while to google it, given its shorthand name.

For others reading this, here is a link to the PartImg Is Not Ghost tool: http://ping.windowsdream.com/