Acronis to image a number of lab machines

Hi all-

First off, let me tell you our situation. We have a lab for testing software that has roughly 30 different computers. An integral part of our testing process is to perform our tests on "clean" machines. This means we are imaging these machines multiple times a day -- 6 different operating systems in 6 different languages. We are currently using Ghost 7.5 but we are "retooling" our lab and looking into other possible solutions.

Our main requirment is that we need to keep the machines as clean as possible. Having to install drive imaging software on each computer, each OS, and each language is not feasable. The way we do it with Ghost is boot from a floppy disk and run a DOS-version of Ghost that allows us to image a drive or partition to another disk and/or CD-R.

Can anyone tell me if Acronis will support a solution like this? Looking at the documentation it seems like it's more of Windows-based software that requires it to be installed on a Windows OS in order to work.

Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

True image 8 is able to use a boot cd that will act the same as the floppy from ghost but I assume a much better GUI. You will have to make the boot cd from a machine that does have TI installed on it though. I doubt this would be a problem though.

Hope this helps,

Chris

 

Thanks for the quick response, Chris. Can you create and restore an image from the boot CD or just restore?

Thanks!

 

You can create and restore with the boot CD and it looks just like the GUI in windows. It is very nice.

Hope this helps,

Chris

 

Hello fender4645,

The full version of the boot rescue CD is Linux based and may or may not detect the hard drive controllers in each of your 30 different systems. Suggest you download the free trial version of TI and check it out. Note that the trial version doesn't allow you to restore a system partition. However, you will be able to confirm whether a boot CD correctly detects your hardware. If everything checks out o.k. then great but I believe you'll need a multi-user licence if using the rescue CD on more than one machine.

Regards