Imaging hard drives

[copyfixer]

My wife recently took over a daycare facility which has a computer room. The computers are all identical Dells which makes it nice. They are in various states of abuse because 4-8 year old kids play educational games all of the time with little supervision on them. I made a master drive on a usb drive and used clonezilla to imprint the master onto each computer, all is good.

After a week or two the computers are all messed up again and I need to re-image again. At the local college, I noticed that the computers at the labs are set so the IT students can do anything as far as experimentation on the computer. If they screw something up...they simply power cycle the pc and the drive is re-imaged. Everything is just like a regular pc until they reboot, so the instructor can put bugs in, etc for troubleshooting. I would like to do the same to these computers. The kids can save their games, etc, any trouble reboot and start fresh. If I set up guest accounts, much of the software doesn't work as it should.

Any help, suggestions, or tutorials would be appreciated.

 

[Andres3605]

When i used to be in my HS tech team we would use a program called deep freeze that would block any changes in the system, after a single restart system is back to the original state.

 

[MrChad]

Check out Steady State

 

[corkyg]

I work as a volunteer instructor for SeniorNet. We have three teaching labs here in Tucson, and I can echo the use of "Deep Freeze." We have two guys authorizxed to unlock and make changes to computers (my lab has 10.) Otherwise, when Deep Freeze is installed and active, anything changed or done to a machine is deleted on a reboot.

This allows students to save stuff to folders omn the HDD, etc., and when the system is powered down and eventually rebooted, all of that is gone.

DF

We also haver an open data drive for volunteers to post teaching materials that is not frozen. *D drive.)

 

[C1]

A similar idea is Centurion Technology's ( http://www.centuriontech.com/p...ts/smartshieldhome.php ) Smart Shield (originally called Drive Shield then Smart Restart). Ive been using both Drive Shield & Smart Restart for at least two years & it has been absolutely phenomenal. The idea of write protecting the HDD (or designated partition) is great from a number of standpoints. Besides providing effectively absolute protection of viruses & spyware (not BIOs), it allows users to try different software or change settings without fear as well as there is no periodic maintenance costs.

Smart Restart provides for keeping changes to Desktop, Favorites & My Documents. If you can live with the constraints (ie, having to deactivate the protection in order to allow installing new programs), it is a great way to go.

 

[copyfixer]

Thanks for the replies. I went with WindBlows steady state. The price was right for one thing. I first put it on the usb master disk. BIG MISTAKE!!! When I started to clone the desktops, it took forever to clone, then the clone did not start/run correctly. I used a system restore on the master to get it off, it was the only way I could get it off. Then I re-cloned the desktops and added it after the cloning was done, one by one to each desktop. It works just the way I need it to. Again, thanks for the help.