Creating an Image of a Computer over the Network

This was unique one.  Had a user that kept running out of disk space.  Plan was to image her drive to a bigger drive (150GB SATA to 500GB SATA).  Problem? She works past 5PM, no upcoming vacation.

DISK2VHD to the rescue!  We can use this program to dump a copy of the disk to a VHD file to a network location after hours.  Imaging 109GB over a 1 Gigabit network took about 2 hours.  Note that Windows 7 can mount VHDs, but not VHDXs.  If you are an idiot like me: you can convert a VHDX file back to a VHD file using the command Convert-VHD within PowerShell on Windows 10.

Now we mount the VHD as a drive in Windows using the disk management snap-in (diskmgmt.msc).  Then I used AOMEI’s Backupper to do a disk to disk clone. The resulting copy needed a partition resize to use all available space on the new disk, so I had to blow away the 300MB Bitlocker partition at the end to expand it in disk management (we don’t use Bitlocker on desktops).

Pop in it and boom: works!

This also works for P2P conversions.  I took a guy from an Optiplex 745 to Optiplex 3020 using the same method.  Upon booting Windows, I got the the famous 7B BSOD.  I used the P2P adjust feature from Paragon’s Hard Drive Manager 15 Professional and was up and running after adding the correct drivers.

-Soli Deo Gloria

 

PowerShell Code to Replace Plain Text with in a Group of Files

Here’s some PowerShell code I wrote to replace the license server for Minitab 19:

# Ignore errors

$erroractionpreference = 'Continue'

# Change Minitab

$configFiles = Get-ChildItem "C:\ProgramData\Minitab" -filter *.ini -recurse -exclude *.dll, *.exe

foreach ($file in $configFiles)
{
 (Get-Content $file.PSPath) |
 Foreach-Object { $_ -replace "XXLIC02", "XXLIC09" } |
 Set-Content $file.PSPath
}

– Soli Deo Gloria