Advice for rolling out 25-30 T61's (imaging / RIS).

[mstefani77]

We're planning on getting about 30 Thinkpad T61's in the next few months. I just received mine a few days ago and was looking for some advice on imaging. My original plan was to use our RIS server and create an image that way. The bad thing about RIS is that it doesn't support multiple partitions so I'm guessing that factory install partition would be lost.

After using the Rescue & Recovery boot option and reloading it to factory condition I kind of like the idea of having the image on a seperate partition and easily accessible. Is there any way to add my own software and then overwrite the factory image with an image of my own? If that's not possible would people suggest buying a copy of Arconis and using that in the same fashion? Any other ideas?

[icantux]

Interesting idea...

But I believe the R&R partition involves some scripting that links it up to the R&R software installed on the machine. You may check into that and perhaps tweak it to your advantage. Not quite certain if that would work though. You'd need a laptop as a guinea pig for that.