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As a bit of follow-up, I see that there is another thread on pretty much the same general topic, which provided a bit more information but not enough to solve the problem definitively . . .
What I want to do probably appears to be a bit strange in the Mac Universe, but it is a very typical thing to do in the Windows Universe when one is doing application developing and testing. There is hardware and software in the Windows Universe that makes this very easy to do, and it is something that is a basic part of a "test laboratory" or "quality assurance laboratory" . . .
Depending on the complexity of a software development project, there can be quite a few computers in the "test lab", and people test new versions of software continually, which often involves "scrubbing" or "flattening" a test machine and then quickly refreshing it via a saved image, so that another round of testing can be done from a known foundation. Usually, the refreshes put a "pristine" image on the machine, but there are times when one wants to restore a test machine to a particular state where there is a problem, for example to determine whether a patch or hot fix works . . .
Is this a huge market?
I have no idea, but from experience, it is very likely that Windows developers who do a lot of testing will have some type of test laboratory, with a few test machines they can scrub or flatten and then restore quickly via "ghosting" software and hardware, so from this perspective it probably maps to a lot of potential customers . . .
The key to being able to do this is that the "ghosting" or "imaging" software must make a low-level copy of everything to the point that when a saved image is restored, it is no different from the original (in every respect), provided the saved image was done of the same machine with the exact same hardware and so forth (which preserves the identifier stuff that travels with the onboard chips and whatever, MAC ID, and all that stuff) . . .
Another way to explain this is to consider the Mac Pro scenario where there are four hard drives, and one hard drive has a Windows XP SP2 instance but is not an OS X bootable drive (in other words, the primary OS X drive is somewhere else). So, I make a complete and full copy of this second hard drive that only has a Windows XP SP2 partition made by Boot Camp (however that is done), which is fabulous . . .
Now, the hard drive crashes and is totally zapped, which means that it must be replaced entirely with a new hard drive . . .
Can I then use the saved image to make the new replacement hard drive the same in every respect as the original?
If so, then fabulous . . .
Otherwise, it will not work for what I need to do . . .
Thanks!
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