Binary Research Universal Imaging Utility 3.5 review

At one time, it was a relatively simple business to set up a computer for a new employee. You simply copied a complete pre-built disk image containing all the required software onto the new system. Now, things are more complicated; software has become more sophisticated and hardware keeps changing. Since an operating system tailors itself to match the hardware during installation, when the disk image is created it will contain only the drivers it needs. When this is written to another system, the drivers won't necessarily match the new hardware and the installation will fail. Similar problems can arise when using disk-imaging software to transfer an existing setup to a brand-new more powerful system. The result is seldom satisfactory, with all kinds of drivers needing to be located and installed before the new system will work properly. Even if the original system was set up to use generic drivers, further problems can arise with the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and even the arrangement of plug-and-play devices.

Binary Research's solution is to include all the drivers available when the original image is created, so they're available to be installed as required when the image is deployed to another system. Windows is quite capable of handling hardware changes provided it has access to the appropriate drivers, and with a database of more than 25,000 device drivers to choose from only the most esoteric hardware is likely to cause problems. To use UIU, you'll need the appropriate version of Microsoft's sysprep utility and must have the .NET 2 runtime installed. The installation process can obtain these for you, and will also guide you through setting up the sysprep configuration. The main part of the installation process consists of downloading the current driver database. New drivers are added as they become available.

Once the drivers database is installed, the system is rebooted and a system image made using whichever disk-imaging software you have. This can then be deployed to the new system and the appropriate drivers will be used.

UIU supports a number of imaging applications including Acronis True Image and Alteris Migration Suite. Symantec Ghost, which was originally developed by Binary Research and subsequently sold to Symantec, is also supported.

There are some limitations, however. Windows Server installations aren't supported, even if the imaging software can create server images. RAID disks aren't supported. SCSI drives can't be used as sources, so although an image can be installed to a SCSI drive it can't be created from one. An image created on an ACPI-compliant system won't be happy on a system that isn't.

Also, your disk-imaging software must be able to run from a DOS prompt; Windows-based imaging software isn't supported.

However, despite these limitations, the software should be able to cope with most PCs, saving your support staff's time and company money, and increasing the usefulness of your disk-imaging software.

Author: Ian Parsons