hey all, I have a question. I'm helping out a network tech at a local elementary school. They just got about 150 Micron PC computers, all of them identical; same mobo, network, video, audio, hdd. She has a site liscense of Xp Pro Corp, and I had the idea of setting up a hard drive with everything the way she wanted it set up, and them copying the entire drive's contents onto another drive (including the protected system files) over and over again for each of the computers. Is this possible? I've thought about deploying them via the network (they all have PXE) but she has a workgroup-based network and does not want to go to a domain, which I believe is a requirement for Windows RIS.

What you want to do is CLONE a drive. Set one computer the way you want it, including colours, customizing, etc. Then take a DISK IMAGE of the drive using a disk image program such as Ghost. (An image is an EXACT byte for byte copy of the drive) You can now load that image onto the other machines.

There is a GHOST technique called multi-casting which will allow an image on one machine to be broadcastto other machines on the network. Only requies a boot floppy on the other workstations. I've seen 30 machines simultanously created this way.

wizard-fred has the right idea i have seen this in action myself and its realy cool its like you set up xp on all computers at the same time "Kernrel Panic"