Sunday, September 9th, 2007
In the second installment, I described how nothing we had planned seemed to work to get the images on the PCs. After a good night’s sleep, we discovered that the CDROM drives for my old Compaq EVO laptop would work in the PCs we needed to image. So, using my laptop, I created a boot CD that used the boot floppy we had planned on using. Upon inserting the drive and CD into the destination PC, everything worked the way we needed it to. The PXE boot project would have to wait until the time pressure was gone.
Shortly after we made the boot CD we decided to use Acronis to create and restore the images. This meant we would have to save images in a different format, but the process would run quicker in the long run. Each Acronis image we created took about 45 minutes to make, but only took about 15 minutes to load onto the destination PC. This enabled us to reinstall the hard disks and memory into the PCs while waiting for the imaging process to complete.
Now that we had a way to create and deploy the images to the PCs, it was time to set up the lab for production. The picture below is where we actually did the work to create the images and run all the updates for them. The laptop provided internet access, and the server (far right) provided DHCP and storage.
Below is the actual Imaging Area:
Next it was off to the gymnasium where the PCs were waiting for us to dig them out, clean them up and get them ready for use.
When they were delivered, this is how they were stacked in the storage room of the gymnasium:
Altogether there were about 300 PCs and more monitors than I cared to count. In order to reach the PCs, we had to move about 30 to 40 monitors out of the way. Once that was accomplished, the rest of the job went very well. We found several CDROM drives for the PCs while we were sorting them, so in the end, we were able to hook up as many as five PCs at a time for imaging. That made the process go much faster than if we could only use one CDROM drive at a time.
Friday night came and went, so we finished up the last of the PCs and started organizing things so we could pack up for the trip home. The final tally showed that we had completed about 70 PCs with the appropriate version of Windows, found two good laser printers for the office and classrooms, and had figured out a good procedure for continuing to image PCs after I left. The final picture in this post is of the completed PCs all stacked and waiting to be placed into their storage room, where they will be available for the classes.
All in all, this was a very interesting and challenging way to spend a week away from the everyday routine of providing technical support at the library where I work.
Related Reading:
2. Right-Click then Copy
3. Paste the HTML code into your webpage