Cloning Windows Sucks

The Opening Rant

Should cloning a Windows workstation be easy by now?

I would think so.

Let me think back to a recent example of cloning a competing platform and see how that went. Here's one that is a little fuzzy; the details are just hazy enough that I'm pretty sure this is what I did, but the specifics are not there anymore...

I had to clone several Mac Minis back when we moved to a new office and the person charged with our audio-visual system wanted a set of Macs running our conference/gathering area televisions.

I built one system to the desired configuration. I then needed to copy it out to several other Mac Minis with the same hardware spec. Rather than screw around with other utilities, I booted the configured Mac to target disk mode, mounted it, and used dd to create a sector-perfect copy of the configured drive to the drive I wanted reconfigured. When dd is used on the entire drive, you create an image of the whole device, including unused space, to a file or target device.

Slow, reliable, and potentially completely destructive. Works like a charm. The drives were the same, the OS didn't care that it was on a new machine and wasn't keyed to a particular device, it booted and was happy (as long as I changed the name of the system.)

Recently I had to complete a re-image of these same Macs when management decided they wanted to boost speed through the use of SSD drives and a memory upgrade. This time around I ended up removing the hard drives, attaching them to a USB adapter and running SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket software. Mainly because I needed a file-level copy, since the spin-drives in the Macs were far larger than the SSD drives replacing them; dd would create images that just wouldn't be happy with that. And SuperDuper! worked just fine.

Easy peasy.

In the past, I know I've used Linux to perform similar copies. That's how I started playing with dd in the first place. Linux, like Darwin (OS X's UNIX-like core under the shiny graphical hood), now has plenty of built-in support for hardware detected at boot-time. Static files are copied at image time, device files and network configuration are generated at boot time. As long as you don't do something stupid with hard coding IP's or network names (yeah, you really need to change that host name at first boot) then you should be fine.

Easy peasy.

Then Along Came Windows

I was reminded of my cloning Windows adventures because I had to clone three laptops from an "okayed" configuration on a master laptop. All same hardware. Should be simple.

But it never is.

Back in my previous life I remembered trying a few different methods for copying a Windows install. Windows itself didn't have great built-in support for imaging. You couldn't even do a straightforward copy.

Well, you could. Chances are you'd have a problem, though.

Sometimes it was simple beginner error. You had to remember silly things like unjoin it from a domain first. That was a great way to have bad things(tm) happen. Machines that looked like they would work but starting acting all hinky, then making you feel stupid because you really should have seen that coming.

Or Windows activation would go wonky. Because Microsoft is really, really protective of your (read: their) rights as owners of the software (you do realize you don't own Windows, right? You license the right to use it. There's a big difference) they like to put stuff in for Windows to properly identify hardware and the installed version of Windows and such. It doesn't necessarily like having the hardware yanked from under it and being transplanted. Sometimes it works, sometimes it mostly works, sometimes it never quite works correctly.

That's when you learn about the next utility every Windows admin gets familiar with, Sysprep. It basically strips the Windows installation down to a "out of box experience" for the next machine, stripping unique IDs and special driver configurations from Windows so you can image it to another machine. It also resets the activation count for Windows licensing. There's whole articles published on how to properly create a Sysprep answer file for proper license activation and configuration if you want to try an unattended imaging.

Oh, yeah. An answer file. Not required, but available if you want an extra dose of "dammit" in your workflow.

In my case, these laptops are running software that was running a little...squirrelly on me to begin with. One of the things this software does is lock a computer's configuration while also altering it to be more or less a kiosk, locking out the ability to write to certain folders and files while presenting a simple view of the desktop with a limited selection of icons to play with.

In other words...I needed to make this image work as easily as possible without spending weeks on troubleshooting if something interfered with Sysprep's file alterations. No answer file for me, thank you. Only need to do this on four laptops.

So configured laptop? Done. Sysprepped? Done. How to clone?

We run a system for deploying images called KACE. Naturally, let's try that first.

I boot from PXE. I tell it to create an image, which KACE uploaded to the server. Then I deploy the image of that partition to the test laptop.

It boots...it's setting up files...it fails. Reboot cycle city. Dammit.

I try again. This time I image to the KACE all three partitions...there's a system partition, the visible partition, and the restore partition. All in one big image. KACE reports it's done with the image. Deploy to the test laptop...setting up files...farther this time!...fails. Permanent reboot cycle with an error message about setup not being able to run.

What caused it? Some hints online say it's possible a network printer driver is screwing it up. Some software, none of which seemed to match what I had installed, can screw up sysprep. More to the point, the initially configured laptop would boot from its Sysprep-induced coma to configure itself just fine (was it resetting my Windows activations? Was it going to suddenly fail because I activated it too many times? Ugh...it's making me PARANOID to keep experimenting...) which hinted to me it wasn't necessarily Sysprep failing but rather something in the image process that wasn't quite capturing properly.

After wasting a chunk of time on this, I decided to go old school on it.

I downloaded an application that automated the process of grabbing a Linux distro and converting it into a bootable USB drive image. I booted the original, Sysprepped, configured system from that USB drive into a "live Ubuntu" Linux. I then used dd over netcat to create a 500 gig image file on my system from the Windows computer.

The dd over Netcat example is a bit outdated, but using Google will show plenty of other examples that give updated caveats.

See, dd is platform agnostic since it's copying the drive sector-for-sector. It doesn't care what's on the drive. It just copies it. Warts (bad sectors, if there are any, and they're readable) and all.

Now I have a really big image file on my spare hard disk. I boot the target laptop with the USB drive and dd my image to the laptop. Although, thanks to what is probably a combination of poor sector size choice and reading a really large file from a USB drive into a network socket, the transfer to the target laptop is slow as hell.

Mental note: if this works, I'm going to use gzip to compress the image.

Finally the process completes. I tell Ubuntu to reboot, remove the USB drive, and Windows setup starts running. It churns through some BS setup crap, I give it a new name, new password and user I'll need to delete later, and TA-DA! I'm at the windows desktop!

I don't know why the KACE had trouble imaging it. I'm sure with more persistence I could find the right variation of the image instructions that will make it like the target system. Or I could buy a disk duplicator and rip apart the laptops for a speedy hardware copy.

But somehow I seem to keep falling back on some variation of booting Linux to get the job done. I end up with dd over Netcat, or Partimage, or dd straight between two drives (DON'T MIX THEM UP!) to get a clone to work. There are utilities that are supposed to simplify things, but it seems like something often goes wrong. It's quite annoying.

Someday I'll figure out how to get KACE to reliably image and deploy. Until then, I use dd. Old school. But old school works.