I am currently trying to get aquainted with Vista's new ways of deployemnt from XP being that I was used to using Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Novell Zenworks Imaging it is a bit confusing what Microsoft is saying in there deployment guides. My understanding is no matter what unless you get BDD 2007 you have to babysit each machine with a USB Key, DVD etc.. and even with BDD the hard drive cannot be blank (new pc direct from factory not preloaded) it must already have an Operating System on it at least this is what it says in there 70-622 Exam Book.
I have also seen this statement in Many Microsoft documents "Unlike many other image formats, WIM images are file-based, enabling them to be applied to an existing partition non-destructively. This has great advantages in deployment processes, since user state can be saved locally"
Does this mean by default the WIM image will not format the drive it simply refereshes the install ? What about viruses and so forth if the computer was infected reimaging would not remove the infection would it ? I am used to when an XP computer gets hit with an infection in our environment we use Zenworks and drop a new image on the PC which formats the drive and so forth.
So I guess my questions are
1. Can Vista actually create a new partition and format the drive during deployment ?
2. Can Vista be deployed to computers with blank hard drives through the network ? (PXE boot etc..)
3. With the new imaging if it does not format the drive wouldn't a virus, malware or such survivie a reimage then ?
4. Can you use Zenworks, Ghost or Acronis to capture a Vista image like you would an XP image and use those tools for deployment to blank hard drives. (since the Vista tools seem like a step backwards since as far as I can tell they do not support deployment to blank hard drives).
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