Absolutely. 100%

But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A fix that gets you 40% of the way there is still 40% less work you have to do by hand. Not everything has to be a fix for all situations. There’s no such thing as a panacea.

How would it not have? You got an office or field offices?

“Bring your computer by and plug it in over there.” And flag it for reimage. Yeah. It’s gonna be slow, since you have 200 of the damn things running at once, but you really want to go and manually touch every computer in your org?

The damn thing’s even boot looping, so you don’t even have to reboot it.

I’m sure the user saved all their data in one drive like they were supposed to, right?

I get it, it’s not a 100% fix rate. And it’s a bit of a callous answer to their data. And I don’t even know if the project is still being maintained.

But the post I replied to was lamenting the lack of an option to remotely fix unbootable machines. This was an option to remotely fix nonbootable machines. No need to be a jerk about it.

But to actually answer your question and be transparent, I’ve been doing Linux devops for 10 years now. I haven’t touched a windows server since the days of the gymbros. I DID say it’s been a decade.

A decade ago I worked for a regional chain of gyms with locations in 4 states.

I was in TN. When a system would go down in SC or NC, we originally had three options:

1. (The most common) have them put it in a box and ship it to me.
2. I go there and fix it (rare)
3. I walk them through fixing it over the phone (fuck my life)

I got sick of this. So I researched options and found an open source software solution called FOG. I ran a server in our office and had little optiplex 160s running a software client that I shipped to each club. Then each machine at each club was configured to PXE boot from the fog client.

The server contained images of every machine we commonly used. I could tell FOG which locations used which models, and it would keep the images cached on the client machines.

If everything was okay, it would chain the boot to the os on the machine. But I could flag a machine for reimage and at next boot, the machine would check in with the local FOG client via PXE and get a complete reimage from premade images on the fog server.

The corporate office was physically connected to one of the clubs, so I trialed the software at our adjacent club, and when it worked great, I rolled it out company wide. It was a massive success.

So yes, I could completely reimage a computer from hundreds of miles away by clicking a few checkboxes on my computer. Since it ran in PXE, the condition of the os didn’t matter at all. It never loaded the os when it was flagged for reimage. It would even join the computer to the domain and set up that locations printers and everything. All I had to tell the low-tech gymbro sales guy on the phone to do was reboot it.

This was free software. It saved us thousands in shipping fees alone. And brought our time to fix down from days to minutes.

There ARE options out there.