Remote Restorations?

[Moonbath]

I currently work for a small company that has a terrible habit of judiciously sending replacement hard-drives to satellite offices across the country. Any time a operating system breaks on their computers, the solution is to ship em a new hard drive with the right image on it, and get the old one shipped back. I can't help but think... there's totally  a better way!

We've had 'recovery partitions' (straight up duplicate partitions of what the disk image should be) on the hard drives since age old, however we don't have any remote software that works below the OS level to get the drive restored from it. I know Unraid has some really awesome capabilities that might be rigged to do something along the lines of this, but I was wondering what else was out there.

A school I worked for had a cool setup where a computer that was booting up could be told to grab an image from a remote server and use it to install from too... Although I have no idea what kind of implementation that is called.

 

I'm curious what the LTT community thinks about this, and hopefully I can get pointed into a good direction to make some lives easier. I mean, there's gotta be some great remote management techniques that can do image restores and more right?

[Windows7ge]

This is 1/2 what you're asking for. It's not remote but it's partition restoration. Setting up a test bench with hot swamp bays you could create a copy of a known good partition with every required file then use a freeware program such as Macrium Reflect to format and reinstall the basic known good partition...unless you were hoping for a remote service that would do it for you.

[Windows7ge]

11 minutes ago, Moonbath said:

A school I worked for had a cool setup where a computer that was booting up could be told to grab an image from a remote server and use it to install from too... Although I have no idea what kind of implementation that is called.

To answer this question. It's a function the computers BIOS has to support where it Boots From LAN. A local server will contain the appropriate installation files and the computer can re-install or fresh install Windows from the local network. Alternatively your organization could look into a program such as Deep Freeze where on regular cycles the OS will wipe itself of all changes and re-load a default image over the current OS. My college uses this to prevent faculty and students from overloading computers beyond operation. Do be careful though, I find it's not the greatest solution in my own opinion. 

[robin5693]

I guess a question I would have is how is the operating system "breaking"? If it's due to user error and they're deleting crucial system files, maybe more education as to how to properly use a computer would be in order?

 

Aside from that, the solution of using Deep Freeze and a networked drive for personal files would probably be your best bet for zero-interaction recovery.