Windows question

[AjC]

Does anyone know if such a facility exists whereby you can take a snapshot of a windows box, modify some settings (say IIS settings) and install new programs and then take a differential?

Basically i need to know if it is possible to roll out any changes made to one windows system over a number of different systems. Unfortunately just replicating the hard drives is out of the question :x

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Cheers,

AjC

[Garda]

Not exactly. XP has a system recovery feature that takes a snapshot of your system after a significant occurance like installing something or changing drivers. It doesn't really work that well though

What you're describing could be done very easily though with a virtual machine though

[AjC]

Cheers for the reply. However, I don't think I explained my problem correctly, my apologies.

My problem is that i need to distribute a VM with Windows on it. Since the Microsoft EULA will not allow this i figured i could assume that the users i am distributing to have a virgin Windows VM that i could provide an installation package for.

The installation package would need to contain configuration settings for all kinds of software and other software packages so after installation it would mirror the system i am working on. How would i go about creating such an installation package?

Is this any clearer? (It's early and i have been revising for exams all night, so forgive me if this too is utter nonsense!)

AjC

[jool]

I'm sure that there is a tool for doing just that somewhere out there that I just don't know about. Until someone figures out what that is you could try doing the install while having process monitor logging all registry and file system changes done by the installers so you can replicate it.

[AjC]

Right, now my exams are out of the way i am going to give this a real shot.

It should not be too hard to code something up that does the job.

First i would need to write a program that records a snapshot of the file system and the registry.

Then code a program that inputs a snapshot and compares it to the current system, recording all additions, removals and modifications, and then package these differences into an installation package.

I'm sure there are some glaring holes in this idea that i currently cannot think of, which is why i am posting the idea. If anyone has any ideas, suggestions or flames please let me know!

The only thing i can think of that would probably not work with this is changes to the kernel, as that would cause all kinds of access violations and what not.

Cheers,

AjC