A while back I posted about moving from Ghost to Clonezilla. Many months have passed, and after using it to roll out a bit less than a hundred computers, I thought I’d give an update.
In short, Clonezilla has worked great. The custom script I created didn’t miss a beat, its speed is fantastic, and I never had a problem with a bad image or any data corruption. In addition, not changing the SID has so far made zero difference in our environment. As long as the computer names aren’t duplicated, we have zero problems.
The only issue I had to deal with wasn’t a Clonezilla issue at all, but a more convoluted method of setting up a default profile in Windows 7. Microsoft has never officially supported copying profiles to the default, although it always worked just fine with Windows XP, and frankly, it’s not worth it to use their Preboot Environment and everything that entails just to set up some custom desktop icons for users. Windows 7 is more complicated than XP, but by following the steps in this thread, especially the steps involving searching and deleting keys from the Registry, it has worked well.
All in all, Clonezilla works great and I do not foresee the need to switch back to a product like Ghost.