Globalize Networks blog

I had a lively exchange with another consultant today that included a discussion of imaging client machines. This other fellow subscribed to what I think is an old school philosophy that there should be a separate volume for the system and the data on client machines. I still subscribe to this view in regard to servers – but in that case we are usually talking about different disk arrays (i.e. a two-drive RAID 1 container and a N-Drive RAID 5 or RAID 10 container)

So his primary argument in favor of a separate system volume (or partition in his case as he is an adherent to FAT32 – which is a whole other can of worms) was that he can keep a “ghost” image on the data partition and if there is ever a problem with the system partition or if the OS won’t boot, he can walk the end-user through booting to DOS and running a script to re-image machine. Now I like the creativity of this solution, but here are my reservations:

1. Using FAT32 is probably causing as many blue screens as it solves. Because it’s not a journaling file system, you are more likely to run into problems whenever Windows is ungracefully shut down.
2. Having users self image a machine risks overwriting data that might have been unknowingly saved to the system partition.
3. It can be a waste of disk space if you allocate too much space for the system partition, but you risk filling it up and bringing the system down if you allocate too little.

I think it’s simplest to just keep one partition.

1. You don’t need to worry about resizing partitions or wasting disk space.
2. Simplifies administration (no need to document or train admins on this aspect of a client build)
3. You can save a base “ghost” image to the fileserver or on a USB drive somewhere. If you do want to risk having the end-user re-image their machine, you can have them first backup their current image to USB.

Of course client data backups are a must:

http://globalizenetworks.com/blog/2008/05/22/client-backups