Cloned computer, now I can't restore it. ThinkVantage backup transfer follies..

Hello and thank very much you for reading and using your time on me!
Sadly, I'm in dire need of help =/

I'm setting 4 computers (Lenovo N500) up for this small company.. They are identical and I therefore thought that I could just set up one of them, backup it and transfer the backup to the others. It was only, when the second computer suddenly wouldn't start after the transfer of the backup that a bell rang for me - of course there are other things than just specs that matter..

But now I'm in a mess. Can any of you help me out? I was thinking of creating a lenovo product recovery disc (from the working computer), but it clearly states that it should not be used on any other pc than that. I could also create a normal thinkVantage recovery disc, so that I might try to recover using the factory backup, but I'm afraid that it's gone after all the mess I made... Perhaps I need to get myself a Vista disc, but none came with the computers, so that doesn't help..

any ideas? All help will be greatly appreciated!

Soul

 

Do you have drive image software in your possession like Acronis? If so you can take an image of a working machine and then put that same image on the other machines.

 

I might very well be able to get it.. The Snap Depoly/Universal deploy looks great, but would it just work for the new machine or would I have to mess with some HAL drivers? And in that case, would you then help me?

 

I'm not IT expert, so take what you want from my comments.

As I understand it one of your four computers doesn't work after you tried to use a Thinkvantage backup program to transfer a disk image from one computer to another. On the computer that doesn't work, are you able to use the recovery software to get it working again?

I'd recommend that you create a disk image of each computer before you start messing with them. Then, when you have them setup how you want, create another disk image so you can restore them to a functioning state.

I'm not sure if you can create an image of one computer, and restore that image on another computer, even if the specs are the same. Wouldn't you then have two computers using the same windows serial number?

 

Yes, that's correctly understood.. I've got 1 working computer, 1 that I've tried transferring the backup to and 2 others that I haven't touched.. and no, I've tried, but it doesn't seem to be able to read the ThinkVantage recovery system so it must have been overridden on the HDD.. I can probably get the ThinkVantage recovery system to run using a ThinkVantage cd, but the backup is probably overridden anyway so..

So I can't take a backup of each computer..

yeah, I think so too =/ and more importantly I'm not sure the internal drivers match any longer, so that's why the computer won't start (even though the specs are the same)..

I think I will try to restore it using a vista basic disc later, but do anybody know if it will then remove all the Lenovo software, which is rather nice for me as a supporter?

 

Honestly this is out of my realm. I haven't played with drive images much but I will pretty soon.

 

If you install Windows using the key that was given and using a Vista disc then it will basically do a clean install and you will lose everything but the OS. You can however download the the Thinkvantage apps from Lenovo and reinstall them. But from a time effective perspective, this would not be good if you want that software.