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Imaging Software that Allows user to inject drivers.

E

exorr

Senior member
Hi All,

Over the past 12 months I've found I've rebuilt quite a few PC's for friends, family, etc for a variety of reasons and am getting a little tired of having to install Windows, Hotfixes, Standard Software, etc everytime.

I'm lookign for software that can provide me the following:

1. Image of Windows Install with SP's and Hotfixes.
2. Injecting Drivers into the image in order to support numerous different hardware setups. For Example: If a friend brings me a Dell Laptop to rebuild I'd like to inject the drivers I know are needed for it into the image before using the image on the laptop.
3. Ability to alter partition sizes, etc from what the base image used.

I've been looking at Acronis and Ghost but am unable to determine if they provide numbers 1 and 2.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Ethan
 
I would slipstream your service packs / hotfixes into your Windows installation media and use DriverPacks to add in drivers. You'll have to run through the full setup process for each PC, but once you're done you should have most (if not all) of your updates and drivers up and running immediately.

MSFN Forums are a great resource for this sort of thing.
 
Another possible solution would be to just image the freshly-built system with Acronis and either make restoration CDs/DVDs and/or a restore image on the hard drive. I have an older version of Acronis on one of my systems... works great. I can restore a basic Win2000 image in about 3 minutes from the hard drive.

If malware happens to be one of the reasons you have to rebuild PCs, consider non-Admin user accounts for the users if possible. Windows SteadyState might be of interest for kids' computers too.
 
nLite.
I made my own custom setup with that, and would never do it "the old way" again. I included sil0680 drivers since I have a system that boots and runs off of a sil0680 based PATA card, and set the install to completely automated.
 
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