Just started working for an pretty shitty AV company and want to improve a few things there...

Just started working for an pretty shitty AV company and want to improve a few things there. We rent out laptops to clients and one of the things that piss me off is that they rarely bother to wipe laptops between rentals. It means that we often get calls complaining a computer is slow. I also think its pretty unprofessional to give people something that has the last persons bullshit and Powerpoint slides still on there.

I've looked into disk imaging but can only find software that requires Windows already installed to run. Ideally i'd like to do the following:
1. Set up a fresh install
2. Have all working drivers installed
3. All basic useful programs (office, VLC, browser plugins, etc...) installed
4. Disable all unnecessary startup programs
5. Make an image of that on a USB stick or external drive.
6. Install the image straight from the POST screen using the external drive.

As soon as a laptop returns so we can put it straight onto reformat with fucking about waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up if the client installed a load of shit on it.

As i've said, most of the programs i've looked at so far have just been backup programs but i'd really like to have something that'll create a clean install with all drivers and programs ready to go without fucking about. Obviously the images would be updated every month or so with all latest updates installed.

I've downloaded a program called AOMEI backupper in the hopes it'll do this but is taking ages to clone the drive.

Any recommendations?

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Sysprer, it's a windows tool, so there's no need for 3rd party software

Oh, it should be sysprep

1) Do a fresh install.
2a) boot into a live Ubuntu/mint environment
3) create an image of the entire disk using dd or the 'disks' utility
4) upon equipment return, (2), then use the utility from (3) to restore the image

Excellent, thanks.

Macrium Reflect can do exactly that. I suggest using an external USB3 HDD so it's not slow as balls.

NTLite might be useful

Thanks

I'm trying this sysprep thing now. I've tried the OOBE option, which basically just created another user account on my test laptop with the first-time startup wizard. The audit option just rebooted the system into the Admin account leaving the original user account and the newly created account on there.

I'm trying the OOBE option now with "generalize" checked. Its going through its first time startup loading screen telling me its installing devices. I don't think this is what i'm looking for to be honest.
I'm reading through this:
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721940(v=ws.10).aspx
which is a bit confusing.

The issue i forsee with this is that it if i were to clone the disk with this program, it will also clone the program, which i don't really want to do.

>We rent out laptops to clients and one of the things that piss me off is that they rarely bother to wipe laptops between rentals.

What? Surely that must be a serious breach of contract...

better off using something like deepfreeze

Well the clients are responsible for the safety of their own data. I still think its a shitty thing to do though.

They would loose everything after one reboot. won't cut it. Also, DeepFreeze welcome to 2001 cybercafes

I think the recovery disk/ISO/stick/whatever Reflect makes can also create images, not just restore them. I'm too lazy to reboot now to check with mine but IIRC it works. Boot the Reflect recovery image and backup your internal drive to some external HDD.

Symantec Ghost

Just connect all the ones you want to flash in lan then blast the same image to all at the same time. Takes about an hour if you have a fast lan

whats AV?

Audio Visual

Basically we go out and set up PA systems and projection for conferences/theatre/gigs

on older systems with regular old BIOS and not UEFI, you can just use disk images and ghost the machine

I haven't done this on a UEFI enabled machine, so I don't know how well it'd turn out.

on IDE hard drives it rarely took more than twenty minutes to ghost a machine. this was on pretty old hardware, mind you

Use Clonezilla Live you fucking morons. "Just Works" and doesn't care what OS's are on the drive. Clonezilla's a really cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything.

Have done what OP wants in production at scale with it, as well as DRBL/Clonezilla server for mass clones via GBEther.

I thought you meant antivirus and was really confused as to why you were also renting out laptops to people

Looking at this now. So basically you install it to an external drive (call it drive D) and then boot from that drive.
You can then make an image of a disk (call it drive C) that saves to drive D
Then you can overwrite drive C or E or F or whatever, with the image on drive D?

Clonezilla is a Linux OS designed for cloning drives. You boot it off USB, then write the image of a physical drive attached to the system you are cloning to another physical drive, or a network share. You choose.

CZ takes care of saving each partition as efficiently as possible, compressing and not copying free blocks if it understands the file system, or bit-for-bit copying unknown partition types. Seriously Just Works once you grok the scripts it uses. It leads you through the steps, pick defaults they almost always work.

Also can make sure saved image is restorable without actually restoring it.

The UI is ugly but don't let that fool you. The things designed to run on all hardware and be simple, so text menus are brutal looking but work on any display.

TL;DR Yes. You got it. And it's fast with USB3 or GbE.

Can you save multiple images with it and name them?

So multiple windows product keys are preserved

Might be over complicating this but have you looked into using something like MDT and setting up a task sequence?

Yes