Chapter 17: Capturing And Deploying Disk Images; What Is A Disk Image; Imaging In Deployment Solution; How Imaging Works - Symantec ALTIRIS DEPLOYMENT SOLUTION 6.9 SP4 - V1.0 Manual

Chapter 17
Capturing and Deploying Disk Images

What is a Disk Image?

Imaging in Deployment Solution

How Imaging Works

File Systems

Partitions

Deployment Solution
A disk image is a file containing the complete contents and structure of a hard drive, or
one or more of the partitions on the hard drive.
This file can be used to restore the structure and contents of the imaged hard drive.
Deployment Solution provides several tools to simplify the imaging process, including
tools to perform hardware independent imaging using sysprep.
Tokens
Database tokens are used throughout the imaging process. When you schedule an
imaging job using the sample imaging job (Jobs > Samples > Imaging > Create Disk
Image), the image is stored as %COMPNAME%.img, and the image description contains
the name of the operating system.
File Systems
RapiDeploy, the imaging engine used by Deployment Solution, understands the
Windows file system and captures just the data. So, an image of an 80 GB hard drive
only requires as much space as the data on the disk.
1. Computer boots to automation.
2. The rapideploy executable creates the disk image and transfers it to a remote location
or reads the disk image and restores the target partition or hard drive.
Hard disks are imaged differently depending on the file system that is used. The source
disk or partition is not changed.
FAT, NTFS, EXT2, and EXT3. Imaging is file-based. RapiDeploy copies real data file by
file, resulting in a clean, defragmented image that can be resized and restored to a disk
of a different size.
Other File Formats. For other file systems, the disk is read sector by sector regardless
of which sectors are in use. The image mirrors the contents of the disk. These formats
are not resizable.
When you create an image, you can image a partition, a group of partitions, or an entire
hard disk. Any partition on a hard disk can be imaged.
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