Using utilites like Norton Ghost and Drive Image is not recommended with the empeg/Rio car player.

The player uses a careful scheme of partitions on the hard disk which, if you used something like Ghost, might not get duplicated exactly. The player might seem to work just fine until the day that you choose to install a software upgrade. At that point, the upgrader will attempt to overwrite the player software partition completely. And if Ghost didn't lay down those partitions exactly right, then the whole thing will go kablooey and require a complete bare-metal format using the Builder utility.

At least that's the way I remember it. If the Empeg guys have any comments on the above paragraph, I'd like to hear them.

I don't know if you realized this (did someone else mention it in the thread?), but there is a utility that comes with Emplode called EmpegClone that will clone one player to another with USB cables, perhaps you could use that? It's not the fastest thing in the world, but as long as you do it from lower serial numbers to higher serial numbers (and you use the 1.03 version), it should work fine.

If EmpegClone takes too long for you, there is another option. If you look at the Drive Upgrade Guide and get comfortable with what's going on in there, you can see the procedure to transfer all of the FID files from one disk drive to another. If you have a linux PC, you can do it by plugging the drives into the PC with adapter cables (but you need to know how to properly mount the drives under Linux). If you do not have a Linux PC, you can do it with the drives plugged into the player. I don't recommend this because to do five players it would be a hassle, and it's not super-fast either (although faster than USB cloning).