Ask Slashdot: FOSS solution to create custom recov

KowboyKrash writes: "OK, a little background I use Acronis to create custom recovery partitions for my personal computers that include all my software and drivers. I work for a Growing computer repair shop which has ventured in to ebay sales of refurbish computers. we receive the machines with wiped Hard drives. since we get multiples of each model we load everything on one then make images with Clonezilla. It would be nice to setup recovery partitions as well.
Acronis is out of the question since it would cost for a license for each machine. Do any Slashdotters know of any FOSS options?"

License the employees.

[mbourgon]

Back in the day, we did something similar with Partition Magic. I called them because paying $50 a computer seemed insane. They sold a "technician license", which I think was $500, and allowed One Named Individual (non-transferable over the course of the year) to use it on as many machines as necessary. You might see if Acronis has this, or if one of their competitors (EaseUS gets a plug because I've used their partitioning tool on my Win7x64 bit machine to resize my boot drive) can do something similar.

Why not use clonezilla?

[egcagrac0]

http://mattmole.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/creating-a-recovery-partition-using-open-source-tools/ [wordpress.com] I can't think of any reason why you couldn't extract the clonezilla livecd files to a drive partition and set up the boot options to automagically restore it