Re: Wait .... What?!
I worked at a PC builder during the windows XP era. Back then if you tried to put a harddrive with XP installed on one set of hardware, into a different machine, it mostly wouldn't boot.
So, this company had to have a different Windows install for every different configuration the sold. Machine B is identical to machine A, but with a soundcard? New image. Different motherboard? New image. Each build image was numbered, and once it had been built, a Ghost image was made, and stored on DVD-R. During my time they were into the 6000's.
So, when a new batch of PCs was being built, someone (often me) would have to go pick all the different hardrives from the warehouse, and then painstakingly write the correct Ghost image to each one. There was an IDE/PATA harddrive duplicator, but this was just as SATA drives were being introduced, so we had several PC's with SATA ports, and each drive was just stood upright on a shelf and plugged into the open PCs. I discovered that SATA was effectively hot-swappable, which saved boot time (Ghost was booted off a floppy disk in each machine), and also that a drive-to-drive clone was possible, which was much quicker than imaging from DVD.
I could of course then use that saved time to sit on my arse and do nothing :)