I think that using LTSP can provide the solution that you are looking for and do it in an automated fashion. Firstly however you will need to include the ide drivers into the LTSP kernel. There was a posting on this list recently on how to do that.
Now via the lts.conf file you can control what happens to each workstation when it boots up. So we write a little shell script and place it in ~/ltsp/i386/etc/screen.d. Then we make a "reconfigure" version of lts.conf that has
SCREEN_01=ourscript
After class we logon to the server and overwrite the lts.conf script with our reconfigure version. Then we go around and reboot all the terminals. When the terminal boots up it will run ourscript. In our script we have the commands that mount the local disk, use dd to copy the desired image from the NFS disk to the local disk. If you copy the boot image as well it will replace the partition table on the ltsp terminals local hard drive.
When each desktop has finished we disable the net boot and reboot the terminal off it's hard drive.
HTH
Pete
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