SquareOne provides local OS management support, for manufacturing and/or maintenance procedures:

• Capture an OS image for manufacture or manual in-field deployment
• Deploy an OS image to a device
• Backup the current OS to a locally stored image
• Restore an OS from a locally stored image
• Upgrade an OS in-place, retaining current applications and settings

Local or Remote OS Management

SquareOne supports two ways of managing the operating systems of a fleet of Windows devices:

Local Management

Suitable for unconnected devices, the tools described in Local OS Image Management support capturing an existing Windows image from an existing device to a standard .WIM image, reverting to a known-good image in case of corruption or boot failure, and deploying a new OS image to update a device. These changes are performed by having someone physically present at the device.

Remote Management

Suitable for connected devices, adding the SquareOne Agent to an OS image allows for management of devices remotely. In addition to all of the local management options described above, SquareOne allows the status and condition of all devices to be monitored remotely and supports both Operating System and application software updates to whole fleets without requiring a visit to the devices. 

For more information, see the following articles:

• Remote OS Image Management - Preparation/Capture
• Remote OS Image Management - Deploy/Restore

Recovery Partition

In both the local and remote management cases, it is recommended that when updating the Operating System on a device, the “known-good” Windows Image or the image about to be written is stored in a hidden SquareOne Recovery Partition.

If the target system does not have sufficient disk space for this additional recovery partition (see SquareOne Recovery Tool), only Local Management can be used. In this case it will not be possible to revert to a stored known-good image, and it will be necessary to install the OS image from a USB key.