Imaging

Today I get to create a "golden" image for our PC's.  With this fantastic task bestowed upon me I've opted to use something FREE for imaging.  A colleague of mine suggested redo backup and so this blog begins...

So first I downloaded redo and Magic ISO (a really great, simple and FREE - up to a max amount of MB ISO burner utility) or Infrarecorder (as suggested on the Redo website), installed Magic ISO and burned the redo ISO.  The instructions were pretty simple,  (and in a nutshell) reboot the PC from the disk and follow the prompts.

But, with all things simple I almost always find challenges.  First being I wanted to use a USB for boot rather than the disk as it's a lot easier to carry around a couple USBs over a couple disks.  Fortunately redo come with the utility to make a bootable USB version of the utility.  Unfortunately after creating the USB the system would not boot from it.  Instead it mocks me stating that an operating system cannot be found.  So I format the USB disk and try again...

I just want to take a moment to state how much I really like Ubuntu and everything it has done for the world.

...surprise, surprise, surprise, the bootable USB still doesn't work...  So, I've now opted to carry a CD around with me.

To continue with the image; redo is ridiculously easy to figure out and use.  Just mount an external storage or network drive to it, select the drive(s) you're backing up (creating an image from), tell redo where you want to stick it and continue.  Now I'm not overly surprised that it takes nearly half an hour to create the image from a pretty impeccably clean Win XP install, with the software taking the image being free.  Luckily, I have a couple other things I can do while I wait; make a coffee, do my morning visit to the men's room, try again fruitlessly to create a bootable USB redo.