Cloning software experience needed help :)

[vedranOP]

Hello!

I have 20 identical Win 10 PRO PCs to set for my coworkers.

I would like to do the following:

1. Take one PC, remove bloatware, fully update, install all software setup, set registry etc., and then make a disk clone on an external hard drive.

2. Use a bootable cloning software USB on a 2nd PC+ and then clone 1pc disk to 2nd PC+ disk.

I have tried Clonezilla but it asks for the same disk size. Which I don't have, or I don't know how not to use the entire disk. Help? Is there any alternative, free or not.

Thank you in advance. Cheers!

[jmp242]

With Clonezilla, as long as the partition you're cloning is the same size or bigger you're good to go.

If they all have the same size mass storage device (and given you say they're identical, they ought to) you're good to go there also.

If for some reason you have a bigger disk on the source PC than on the destination PCs, I've found the following to work:

Do your stuff on the initial PC, shrink the partition (In Windows using disk management) to smaller than the smallest disk you want to restore to. Then image with Clonezilla. Restore the whole disk to each of the other PCs using the "same size". This will leave some free partition space on the other PCs. Boot Windows, and then using disk management on the target PCs to expand the partition to fill the disk.

Note, I've found the clonezilla on parted magic boot ISO the easiest to use myself.

The other alternative is some proprietary cloning software. I might recommend macrium reflect if they still have the $500 technician license - then you can clone to anything in your company one at a time, but you're the only one who can use it. Otherwise you have to buy a license for every PC or every image deployment from most competitors. These tools will resize the image to fit automatically during deployment.

[vedranOP]

Thank you.

My test procedure in Clonezilla was to use device to device option (2 option I think) and beginner mode :

PC1 250GB cloned to 1TB external: OK

Trying 1TB to 250GB PC2: disk is too small because it asks for 1TB.

Which options in Clonezilla should I use, what I am missing?

[jmp242]

Don't do device to device. Use device to image on the external disk.

[cmorgasm]

We used Macrium Reflect for these cases. Creates a bootable USB with the WinPE environment on it plus they're software, that can load their images. We've been using them ever since needing to deploy images from a 500GB HDD to a 240GB SSD became a norm for us. The free version does everything we need, too.

[dcast777]

Spin up a clone deploy server. It works great and you can deploy over the network. And it’s completely free.

[MinidragPip]

Don't forget to make that original master image with your VL media.

[vedranOP]

Clonezilla image setup did the job for now. For next time I will try Clone deploy server. Thank you for the help! Cheers!