Abstract: To accelerate the process of installing software on a number of computers, an image is created with the same formatting as the target drive in each computer onto which the software is to be installed. To do so, a controller determines the manner in which target drives on the computers are formatted. The image drive is then created with the same formatting, using the known target drives as a frame of reference. Once the image drive has been created and the desired software bundle loaded onto it, the software is installed on the computers from the image file, on a block-by-block basis, rather than utilizing individual file transfer under the control of a higher level file management program.