Trouble Imaging CF-31

Hi, I have ordered a bunch of CF-31s for my fleet and am having trouble imaging them. Normally I image systems by saving the image to a USB and then restoring that image to new machines. Problem is, I can't see the USB in any of my imaging programs I have tried both PING and CloneZilla as I have always had good results with those, but unfortunately not on the toughbooks. So I pulled the hard drives out of their caddies and connected them to an older HP machine I had, which allowed me to create and restore images to the disks, but for some reason the restored install of windows won't boot. It blue screens, boots into windows repair, and just loops through that repeatedly. Is there a trick to creating an image for the CF-31? Any ideas why I am having troubles?

 

Are the usb ports enabled in the bios? I would try setting to bios to default on all settings ...then see if your usb drive is seen. I have used Acronis One-Click Restore for this kind of imaging successfully. Perhaps you could try Acronis One-Click Restore

 

Please try plugging in your USB drive and turning on the Toughbook CF-31. While it is booting up and with the Panasonic Splash Screen showing, Press F2. You will be directed into Bios. Tabbing over you should find the boot order. Your USB drive should be shown. Scroll down until your USB drive is highlighted, press F6 until it is at the top of the list...and then Press F10 to save and reboot. I have used Acronis to clone a Toughbook to an external hard drive / usb drive and then cloned many Toughbook CF-19's. Should work for you also. Try this using PINg and/or CloneZilla...if it still does NOT work you might try Acronis. Of course, you could also use an original Panasonic Image RE-Install disk.

 

My .02 cents... Buy a good Recovery Disk for the model you are imaging. Update it and THEN clone the disk! If you have MK1, 2 & 3 models... You would need a separate Recovery Disk for each MK... If they are all the same series, once installed from a recovery disk... Clone the same disk over and over. You apparently have an issue with drivers not working or an incorrect OS installation.

If you plan on installing SSD drives I would HIGHLY recommend that you install the recovery disk to an SSD and clone from that to other SSDs.

Again... Just my .02 cents. Sometimes the cheap and easy way is just too cheap and easy.

 

I prefer Acronis, but this article tells you how to clone using Windows own software. I have found the information helpful.

http://www.ssdfreaks.com/content/664/how-to-clone-hdd-to-ssd-with-windows-7s-own-software

This is a nice little program for making USB drives bootable.

RMPrepUSB

 

Shawn... I have to say... You are always giving excellent help! Well done!

 

I second that Rick... (You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Shawn again.) well at least I tried

 

Thanks guys...

I am a member of a team of highly trained monkeys.

 

Great advice! I will try Acronis. I haven't used it in the past because of the cost, but if it works better than what I have been using, it will be worth it. I will try the recommendations, but for just a little extra information, I have no trouble booting from the USB. If I have my imaging software on USB, it will boot fine, it will see the internal hard drives, but it won't see the USB drives. It's almost as if the USB ports are USB3, while the software can only see USB2.

I am also using the windows installation that comes on the hard drive, meaning I boot into the bios, go to the exit tab, then hit Recovery Partition. From there I can recover the computer to the factory install of 32 bit or 64 bit. I choose 64, and it reloads the OS. Is that different than purchasing a good recovery disc as mentioned above?

 

Is it the factory Panasonic recovery partition? If so, it should be the same. Although I would find a way to make a DVD of the recovery partition. If you experience a drive failure that partition will be useless.
Acronis boots to a USB stick and finds the drive images on the USB stick. I've done it several times. Pretty sure the Acronis boot is a version of Ubuntu.

 

I only paid $15.00 (reg. $39.99) for mine from Newegg.com last week but they have it on sale all the time for $17.99 to $19.99

 

It is a factory panasonic recovery partition. I will definitely be making a copy of it though. That is why I am trying to create the image. It will essentially be a freshly loaded OS with all our applications and settings pre-loaded. It will make it quick and easy to deal with hard drive failure, corrupt OS, or new toughbooks.

 

Your recovery is parts of windows I believe and not special to the Panasonic. The Recovery Disks don't install a separate drive partition for recovery...That is what the disk is for. So yes... Unless your CF-31 came with the 64bit version the only way to install it is the way you did.

When I bought my CF-31... The guy told me he installed the 64bit version from the 32 bit disk doing what you did. Tell it that you need to go into recovery and then tell it to restore the 64bit version. My machine kept bluescreening so I just nuked that when I installed my 250GB SSD... With 32 bit. I went ahead and installed 8GB of RAM just in case I want to go 64 bit later... but with the SSD... I couldn't imagine it going much faster.