I use a great little drive imaging tool from
http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/intro.htm called snapshot. I use it to remotely image hard drives on Windows computers, It is an excellent candidate for a custom action and is well worth the price (39euros last time I checked).
This program has many features but the main ones of interest are; single exe, no install needed, can be driven from the command line i.e. perfect for using with psexec for remote drive imaging.
Here is the custom action I use (Lansweeper version 4.0.0.102) - just change "fileshare" to the name of a network share you wish to store the images on, and change "adminuser" to a user that has admin access to the computer to be imaged and write access to the network fileshare.
{actionpath}psexec \\{computer} -u {domain}\adminuser {actionpath}snapshot.exe c: \\fileshare\{computer}-$DISK-$DATE.sna --exclude:\i386,\Temp,\Windows\Memory.dmp,\Windows\Minidump\*,\Windows\$NtUninstall*
This action performs the following; The snapshot program will image the C:\ drive writing the image to the network file share.
The $DISK and $DATE are special commands for the snapshot program i.e. image of C:\ drive on computer called test imaged on the 20th of May would be called test-c-100520.sna
Snapshot will also exclude certain folders indicated by the comma separated list with the --exclude: switch. By default the paging file and hibernation file are excluded and don't need to be specified.
When this custom action is run it will open a command prompt and ask for the "adminuser" password, then the snapshot program will start up and begin imaging the disk. Progress is shown as it runs.
Once the imaging is finished (seems to be quite quick) I just run the snapshot.exe program directly and from it's GUI I can mount the image as a drive letter to view files etc.
To image different drives I create separate actions specifying the drive letter.
Cheers
Jason
