Post-cloning Operations
Two machines with identical names are said not to be allowed on the same network, and, for Windows NT and its successors, two machines with identical security IDs (SIDs, aka Security Identifier) are said not to be allowed on the same Active Directory domain. A disk cloning program should change these as part of copying the disk or restoring the image. Some operating systems are also not well suited to changes in hardware, so that a clone of Windows XP for example may object to being booted on a machine with a different motherboard, graphics card and network card, especially if non-generic drivers are used. Microsoft's solution to this is Sysprep, a utility which runs hardware detection scans and sets the SID and computer name freshly when the machine boots. Microsoft recommends that Sysprep be set up on all machines before cloning, rather than allow third party programs to configure them. Similarly, Linux systems simply require the necessary kernel modules to be available (or compiled directly into the kernel), in order to support new hardware when the machine boots. However there are ways to help make images for cloning with Windows more portable. One such example would be a product called Universal Imaging Utility from Binary Research (original developers of Symantec's Ghost) which incorporates a large number of hardware device drivers into the sysprep routine.
When it comes to "Domain SID", the Domain SID is recomputed each time a computer enters a domain. Thus, all the "post-cloning operations" that are based on "leave the domain and then rejoin the domain" will actually cause a re-creation of the Domain SID for the computer that joins the domain.
In other words, duplicated SIDs are usually not a problem with Microsoft Windows systems
There are files in some Microsoft operating systems (called BOOTSECT.*) which are copies of the Boot Partition Block (BPB) used by alternate operating systems that Microsoft Windows loader (NTLDR) can load. BOOTSECT.* files may have to be altered if partition sizes or layouts are changed during the clone.
Linux systems usually boot using either the LILO or GRUB bootloaders. These contain lists of absolute disk sectors in their MBR, which must be altered by the cloning program as the files they refer to are likely not to be in the same location of the destination disk. For example, if the original boot loader script points to the system being on a disk on channel 0 and the system being of the second partition, the target computer will need to have the same configuration.
Read more about this topic: Disk Cloning
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