Windows Cloning & Imaging Tool: Microsoft AIK/ImageX

Microsoft Automated Installation Kit/ImageX
Superlong Microsoft Download link

If you've ever used Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, or (back in the day) DriveImage, you know the benefits of drive cloning when you need to distribute the same image every time to a new physical box that comes through the door. Coupled with Sysprep and a decent amount of knowledge regarding driver setup, you could feasibly have a single image for multiple hardware platforms.

Cloning software isn't cheap for those of us supporting SMBs, and Ghost holds a pretty firm stranglehold on the market (no) thanks to Symantec.

Winds of change...?

But, lo! What's this I see from the dark tower of Microsoft? A free imaging tool? Microsoft has released an Automated Installation Kit for Vista or "AIK" for short, which includes among other things, a drive imaging component, called 'ImageX'.

The gargantuan kit (a BIG download at ~990Mb) is geared towards deploying Vista in a business environment (replacing RIS), but the real beauty? You can use the ImageX component to create deployment images of Win 2000, XP , and Server 2003 as well...

Modify that image!

Not only can you use ImageX to capture and apply images, but you can mount these images to a local directory, effectively making it as simple as copying and pasting files into/from a folder if you wish to modify the image. Very nice.

Capturing/Applying an image:

One thing I didn't necessarily like was the fact that the verify switch gets turned on automatically when you want to capture an image over a network connection, which can really lengthen your capture time immensely. So, perhaps it might be best to hook up a USB 2.0 drive to capture your drive...(if possible) that is, if you in a hurry. When I applied an image, it was smooth as silk - - download speeds are good. I was able to pull down and apply a 3Gb image in about 10 minutes or so.

Switches

You bet your sweet bippy there's switches. This is a command-line tool...and well, it wouldn't do any of us super-typists any justice if they weren't there! I won't go into the full set of ImageX switches, but very quickly I can tell you that you can mount an image with read (and read/write) permissions, export information from an image, store multiple images within a single WIM file, append images to a WIM file, delete images - all from the command-line. Very nice and easy to use. See the documentation for more details.

Limitations:

Of course, there are some limitations - - it can't apply or image any filesystem format other than NTFS, FAT, or FAT32. Also, you need to run it outside of the Windows environment (not suprising). Finally, it is command-line only, which hardly isn't a show stopper for the intended users of this tool.

The best use (only use?) of this tool is inside of a PE bootable disc image (see my article about Reatogo here). And, if you are handy enough, maybe you've come across an HTA front-end for the tool (there are a couple around, one written by yours truly).

Get my version of the HTA front-end here. The current version (.03) supports only the Append, Apply, Capture, and Info functions - more to come later.


Likes:

• Well, it came from Microsoft, so it should work just fine with any of our Windows boxes.
• Ability to mount images into a folder, for easy drag & drop updates.
• Free. Hey, its Microsoft we're talking about, so "free" isn't always easy to come by with them.
  

Dislikes:

• Automatic verify switch enabled when performing a network capture = long upload time (major)
  
• No support for other filesystems (medium)
• No GUI (minor)

Alternates:

• DriveImage XML
• Self Image
• Macrium Reflect 4.2 Free - cfj review (added 06/18/08)
  
• XXClone

See my related post on Geeks Are Sexy...

Have any questions or comments? Respond below!