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We're rolling out laptops to some of our staff that will require SQL Server 2008 R2 Express be installed. We'd naturally prefer to do the setup of the laptops (including the installation SQL Express) once and then clone it to the other 50 or so machines. Will the cloning cause problems with SQL Express? Should we consider doing that install manually after the cloning instead?

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Hmmm... good question. I'm thinking there's going to be at least one task needed: Running sp_dropserver and sp_addserver on each laptop after they boot into the cloned image. I'm sure there's probably more and to be honest I'm not even sure that imaging is a supported operation with SQL installed.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174310.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174411.aspx

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Imaging a machine with fully configured SQL Server is not supported. When you change the host name, there are numerous registry entries and tables inside SQL itself that will break. You can do a SQL Server SysPrep for this kind of thing. The steps are too numerous to document here and can be found in the SQL Server documentation.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/considerations-for-installing-sql-server-using-sysprep?view=sql-server-2017

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