Back in the day (late 90s) I worked with a school who partitioned their desktop systems into two drives, the main Windows drive and a secondary hidden drive which held a system image for easy restore when the users inevitably screwed up the main Windows drive. They could restore an entire computer suite in half an hour (or so they claimed). I've been trying to replicate this setup but failing.
I'm aware of Ghost and Clonezilla but they're not working quite right for me. Ghost is a commercial product which would be a problem for us - we'd then have to license that to the people we're selling Desktops to, which although isn't the end of the world is a lot of admin work in tracking licenses. Clonezilla isn't quite right because it's not automated enough - you have to mount the drives, find the image, then restore it to the right place; I want a boot option which will let the users do all of this automatically.
I'm aware of system manufacturers who provide this sort of setup, HP in particular, but we mostly work with refurbed machines of all different manufacturers and I'd like a solution to handle every machine. And yes I know the image would have to be created for each machine, so I'm hoping that can be automated as much as possible too.
Is there some better software that will handle this or am I going to have to start creating something myself?