Question : Problem: Cloning Best Practices with Vista and Dissimilar Hardware

Acronis and Ghost work very well when you have identical hardware when it comes to cloning PCs for deployment.  What is a best practice for cloning dissimilar hardware?  I recently cloned 12 brand new PC's for my brother's office, but when I tried to use the same image on a slightly older but capable test PC, the cloning didn't work.  I ran Vista's repair, loaded the appropriate disk driver and no luck.

I'd rather avoid doing scripted installs, but if that's the only way.  What I'd ideally like is a single image for all PCs in the office in case of hard drive corruption, or if a new PC is purchased.

I typically deal with AD and Exchange so workstation deployment is not one of my major areas, but I'd like to learn this.

Thanks,

-Ted

Answer : Problem: Cloning Best Practices with Vista and Dissimilar Hardware

Windows Deployment Services works well for this. It requires some setup but, works well.
See the following for more information:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/9e197135-6711-4c20-bfad-fc80fc2151301033.mspx?mfr=true

Also, there are new products on the market that will allow you to restore to dissimilar hardware.

Acronis uses a universal restore feature for example.

Just make sure if you do this to sysprep or use the newsid tool from Sysinternals. Also, you want to do this when the computer is a member of a workgroup and not the domain.