What is the best way to clone Win7 machines?

Posted by John Hoge on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by John Hoge
Published on 2011-11-17T23:02:51Z Indexed on 2011/11/18 1:53 UTC
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deployment

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Win7

I'm looking to buy 5 new Win7 boxes and would like to ease deployment by cloning the OS. What I would like to do is install a fresh OS (Dell doesn't seem to sell machines without preinstalled crapware anymore) and then install a few apps on the first one.

Once it is just right, I want to clone the OS and install the image on the other four machines and just change the machine name.

Is this possible to do without any extra third party software? What I am thinking of doing is backing up the disk image of the first machine to a network share, and then booting the others to the windows install DVD and restoring the same image on each machine.

Has anyone had any luck with this technique?

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