Absolute Beginners Guide to A+ Certification. Covers the Hardware and Operating Systems Exam

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Like making copies? Sick and tired of installing Windows from scratch on 20 identical PCs? Windows NT/2000/XP can be installed from a disk image of another installation created with a program such as Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image. This process is called disk cloning .

For disk cloning to work, the systems must be identical in every major feature, including

  • Same motherboard

  • Same ATA/IDE or SCSI host adapter

  • Same BIOS configuration

caution

Do not use disk cloning to make illegal copies of Windows. You can use disk-cloning software legally to make a backup copy of your installation, but if you want to duplicate the installation on another PC, make sure you are cloning a system created with a multiple-computer license for Windows and make sure that you do not exceed the number of systems covered by that license. You can clone standalone computers or those connected to a workgroup (but not a domain).

At a Windows software level, the systems must use the same Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and the same Ntoskrnl.exe (NT kernel) file.

The hard disk of the target for a cloned installation must be at least as large as the original system, or larger.

A cloned system is identical in every way to the original, including having the same Security Identifier Number ( SID ) . This can cause conflicts in a network. The SID and other differences in network configuration between the original and a cloned system can be automatically configured with the Sysprep utility from Microsoft. The Sysprep utility is available in separate versions for Windows NT/2000/XP. It is not provided on upgrade versions, but on full and OEM versions of the media.

Sysprep is installed on a system that will be used for cloning before it is cloned. A special mini-Setup Wizard starts on the cloned computer the first time it is run after cloning. Sysprep uses an answer file created with the Setupmgr utility described earlier. When it runs on the cloned system, it creates a unique SID and makes other changes as needed to the network configuration of the system.

The version of Sysprep on the Windows NT 4.0/XP CD-ROM is ready to use. However, although a version of Sysprep is included on the Windows 2000 CD, you should download an improved version from the Microsoft Web site.

The SIDWalker utility can be used to change SIDs manually on Windows NT 4.0/2000.

The Windows XP version of Sysprep has additional features compared to the Windows NT 4.0/2000 versions, including factory (configures computer with customized settings or applications as desired) and auditing (checks system for functionality before delivering it to an end user ).

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