Dateiliste

Especially in bigger companies, it has become very common to clone entire operating system installations.

The benefits are quite obvious:

1. It saves a lot of time and configuration work.
2. It saves a lot of time and configuration work.
3. ...

It goes without saying that at least the required amount of Windows licenses are necessary, left alone the licenses for additional software.

There are some pitfalls, however, when it comes to updates etc, but I don't want to cover them here in this article, because almost all versions of Windows come in so many flavours nowadays that I'd have to update the information on quite a regular basis.

When an entire disk image including a Windows operating system is cloned it has the same computer security identifier, short SID. The Windows operating system family is full of those SIDs, which can refer to users, computers, and other resources. When cloning a disk, the computer SID is relevant. Microsoft released a list of so-called Well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems, and some people even believe that some of them are bound to the computer hardware like the network card's MAC address.

On a Windows NT domain, when the domain controller encounters two or more Windows computers with the same SID, it throws both of them out of the domain. Without changing the SID on one of them there's no chance to get them back on the domain.

Active Directory seems to handle cloned disks more gracefully than the older Windows NT domains. Since I couldn't find more detailed information from Microsoft, I still recommend applying a new computer SID to cloned systems before they go life.

The software NewSID from Sysinternals can apply a new computer SID. Make sure you read through its accompaning documentation before using it. The suggestion about the backup may be a little bit exaggerated when you go on applying a new SID to a fresh clone (I think the clone is already a backup, that's why it has been created at all.)

Homepage and download link of NewSID