Here is a step by step guide on how to use a Large External USB Drive and Zenworks Imaging to Image computers that are not connected to the Network.

WARNING: this process will wipe out any data you currently hold on your USB drive. You will be formatting drives which will erase all data on them, so if you don’t want to lose it, back it up before proceeding or get another drive.

NOTE:

When imaging, if your USB hard drive is on anything other than sda1, you will need to modify the syslinux.cfg on your USB boot volume. Change the info in each section at install=hd:/dev/sda1 root=/dev/sda1 to reflect the location of your USB hard drive.

Also when you mount the DATA drive for imaging, you will need to modify the mount command at step 13 to reflect the device location. For this, we will set up a 30 MB FAT volume that will act as our boot volume, and a 37 gig NTFS DATA volume that will hold our images. I use FAT for the first volume so that we can use SYSLINUX to make the volume bootable to the ZENWorks imaging environment. I use NTFS for the DATA volume to support the large volume size. I can copy the images from the XP workstation to the USB hard drive, and the ZENWorks imaging environment can read NTFS volumes so we can pull the images from there without being limited by size.

Here is the step by step:

1. Plug in your external USB hard drive that you will use for the imaging process into a Windows XP computer that has the ZEN7USB tool loaded on it.
2. Open up the Computer Management found in START/SETTINGS/CONTROL PANEL/ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS, or Right-click on My Computer and select MANAGE.
3. Select the Disk Management under Computer Management (Local)/Storage
4. Find the USB drive. Here it is listed as DISK 2 (Fig1).

5. Right click on the partition and select New Partition.
1. Click Next at the wizard.
2. Accept the default of Primary Partion, and click Next.
3. Change the partition size to 30 MB.
4. Assign a drive letter. For this example I will use U. Click Next.
5. Format the partition as FAT, Default allocation unit size, and change the Volume Label to read ZENworks. Check Perform a Quick Format, and click Next.
6. Click Finish to create the volume.
7. Leave the Computer Management console open for step 8.

6. Sys the newly created drive with syslinux.
1. Open a DOS Prompt
2. Run the command to sys the drive U created in Step 5:

   c:ZEN7USBUTILSSYSLINUX U:

   NOTE: You may get an error when running the command. If so, click IGNORE and the command should complete successfully despite the error.

7. Copy over the contents of the ZEN7USBDATA directory to the U: drive. Edit the Settings.txt as needed.
8. Go back to the Computer Management Console and set the U: as Active
1. a. Right-click on the ZENworks U: partition and select Mark Partition as Active.

9. Create the data partition on your USB drive to hold your images.
1. Right click on the Unallocated space on the USB drive and select New Partition.
2. Click Next at the wizard.
3. Select Primary Partition and click Next.
4. Select the default max size, or create the size you want.
5. Assign a drive letter. For this example I will use X. Click Next.
6. Choose NTFS as the file system, Default allocation unit size, and Volume label of: DATA, and click Perform a Quick Format. Click Next.
7. Click Finish to create the volume.

10. Copy over your .zmg images onto the DATA volume.
11. Connect the USB drive to the machine that will be imaged and boot it.

    NOTE: make sure that your computer supports booting to the USB device and is set to do so in the BIOS.

12. At the boot menu, select MANUAL.
13. At the BASH # type in:

    mount /dev/sda2 -t ntfs /mnt/usbhd

    NOTE: the /dev/sda2 is your second DATA volume. If it’s something other than sda2, you will need to change the command to reflect this.

    IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT IMAGING: Yes, this is important!

    Because of the nature of the imaging process, if you use the command line, automatic or through the GUI to do your imaging, it will wipe off the boot partition from the USB drive in this process. It will not touch the DATA volume because it is mounted at the time of imaging. If you image your computer and do not take the following steps, you will add more work for yourself. Worst case is you have to repeat steps 1-8 to get your boot partition back. Here are some tips that you can do to prevent this from happening:

1. Write-protect the USB drive. Un-protect the USB drive any time you want to make changes to the ZENworks partition or add/remove images from the DATA partition.
2. If you can’t write protect the drive, use the IMG command to select what partitions get wiped and imaged.

   Ex: img rl /mnt/usbhd/myimage.zmg a1:p1

   If need to be more thorough you can:

         Delete the first partition: Img pd1

         Create the first partition: Img pc1 NTFS

         Set the first partition active: Img pa1

         Put the image on the partition: Img rl /mnt/usbhd/myimage.zmg a1:p1

14. Image your computer from the GUI if your USB hard drive is write-protected.
1. Type in IMG at the bash# and hit Enter.
2. Select Imaging and Restore Image.
3. Select local.
4. Type in the path to your image. (ex: /mnt/usbhd/myimage.zmg)

   NOTE: If you browse to the file, it may not be listed, so type in the path to the image.

5. Begin imaging.

You can create a script to facilitate the mounting and automatically pushing out of the image (steps 13 & 14) if you so feel. You can put them in the /addfiles/bin folder and they’re accessible to the imaging environment.

Tags | Netware