I posted this on stackoverflow but was told that this is a more appropriate forum for this kind of question.
I have a situation where I need to test some stuff (hardware) on multiple operating systems (viz. Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 - 32 and 64 bit variants).
The idea is to have a suite of tests run so that the device is qualified for windows (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/WLK/default.mspx).
Due to a resource crunch, I have to make do with a limited number of machines and need to reimage them with different OSes and rerun the tests.
I initially considered capturing the test OS images using plain 'ol dd from Linux and rebooting into them using GRUB but the WLK software requires a working Windows machine on the client side hence this approach won't work.
I've managed to install XP-64 on C: and installed Vista/7 into another partition. Using the Vista bootloader and some of the command line tools from the Microsoft site (ASI - Automated Software Installer and imagex - the imaging tool), I'm able to work with this.
However, when I have to image the test partition with windows XP and automatically boot into that and back, I get numerous problems with the bootloader and can't really do it.
I'm interested in knowing if someone has automated this process and what's the recommended way of going about it. I'm a unix person myself and am not very knowledgeable about the tools available in windows to do this.