Generating new SID for Windows 7 cloned partition in Linux?
- by Jack
So I've read that the proper way to clone a Windows 7 partition is to run a Sysprep after the clone is complete. For MANY reasons, this is not possible the way we are cloning these drives (long story short, the drive should be fully up and running after we clone it, with all the settings already there and requiring no user intervention; and no, not even an answer file would work because the way we customize all the Win7 settings is complex and we do not want the user touching the settings). I understand Microsoft will not support Windows 7 clones if it is not sysprepped and that is fine for us.
Acronis recovery tools get around this by ticking an option called "Create new NT signature", which resets the SID and GUID on any restore. Symantec has a tool called Ghostwalker which does the same thing. However, we are looking for a way to do this in Linux because we want to use open source tools to do the imaging (fsarchiver, partclone, etc. basically the same tools Clonezilla uses internally to clone NTFS partitions). The question is, if we clone using these tools in Linux, how would we generate a new SID thereafter (without the use of sysprep)? Is there any way to do it within a Linux environment? The whole image process is automated so if it is a simple command that I can just throw in my shell script, that would be even better. Of course, it would be nice to know if this is even possible. Any ideas?
EDIT: Forgot to mention that the target machines we are restoring the image on are EXACTLY the same.
