I had 88 pieces of HP 840 G2 laptops. On one of them I installed Windows 7 with updates and drivers and cloned whole hard drive (all sectors) to the rest of the laptops.
According to this topic - if it's the same model, it's safe: Can my laptop's Hard Disk be cloned and loaded to another laptop?
Now some users have problem with blue screens. I know they are associated with wireless network card. There also was no Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter detected. I uninstalled the driver and installed it again and it helped, blue screens disappeared and two Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter items appeared in Device Manager. If it's safe to clone HDD, why do I have problems with it?
Now, I clone HDD differently. I use Sysprep with "Generalize" option to clone OS with updates and I add drivers to WIM image using DISM. I didn't see any blue screens yet, but again OS didn't detect any Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter, so I'm starting to worry that it's the same situation. Also there's C:\Windows\Temp folder taking whole free space after some time. I had the same problem when I was cloning HDD without Sysprep and DISM.
Answer
When I install drivers in audit mode using driver installers, without using DISM or WAIK, and then I sysprep the same way as usual (oobe and generalize), but with answer file containing PersistAllDeviceInstalls option, it works perfect.
The only disadvantage I've noticed is that when I deploy image to different PC with device which device ID is different, but is also contained in the same INF file which was used to install driver, it doesn't recognize it, but it's not a problem at all, because I can prepare different image for each model.
I can prevent C:\Windows\Temp taking whole free space by emptying C:\Windows\Temp and C:\Windows\Logs\CBS contents before sysprepping. After that OS is removing those files regularly.
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