dim

I am just curious if someone can help me confirm my thoughts. We have ESX 3.5 environment and we are working on our automated solutions for Windows 2008. In the initial WinPE pass we format Drive C and Drive D and Drive E per say. Drive D is our pagefile and Drive D is apps and we format that NTFS and change the cdrom driver letter and all the disks show online and everything looks great. After Windows installs and reboots to start the finishing installation process all the remaining disks other than boot disk appear offline in diskpart. We are only seeing this on Windows 2008 x86. Windows 2008 x64 works fine. Can someone please confirm they are seeing this if they have a similiar environment to test with or provide insight. thanks dim

I am not sure what the issue is. This should be pretty straightforward. Are you using Windows System image manager? Add the Foundation Pack to your XML file and chose your roles and options

We have moved on With DataImages as Microsoft suggested and it works awesome.. better than $oem$ ever did...

Look at NetSH command. You will be able to get everything you need through that command

After the unattended installation the files get copied to C:\Windows\Panther All files need to be removed when you are done.

But.. On another note, I do have some more questions regarding dataimage... I will have to do some research.. What about the $$ structure .. Does all that go away?

CCGuy Exactly... Maybe my terminology is off, but that is exactly what I was stating before. I am moving towards DataImages. From what i read from your post, it sounds like you are taking the install.wim file and injecting stuff into them. That is not my understanding of DataImage. My understanding of Dataimage is you create a custom WIM file and associate it in your unattend.xml file. Once the system comes up, the files get extracted to the root of the systemdrive. In my opinion, it doesn't touch the actual source, install.wim. Now the tricky part is how to dynamically create a dataimage and then associate it in your unattend.xml file. How does that sound?

CoolComputerGuy I haven't seen that documentation, but i personally am not a fan of injecting into the install.wim file. To me that doesn't allow the flexibility of a true scripted installation... I am toying with the idea of using imagex and capture the associated drivers per hardware platform in WinPE and haveing a generic driver folder in the audit pass for PNP drivers.

Max- I appreciate your advice. I am a believer of leaving the base WIM intact b/c by creating a process that injects drivers into the WIM file doesn't quite allow for the flexibility.

We are not image based.. We are scripted install. We must use setup.exe /unattend:unattend.xml.

Thanks for replying to me... Now can you help me understand if I am using let's say Altiris to deploy images via scripted installation and not image based. So I am lauching setup.exe /unattend:unattend.xml what should I be looking at most to allow for the most flexibility of adding new hardware. I want to try not to update the install.wim file itself, but be able to add flexibility. For example, with our old windows 2003 builds we dynamically find out our mass storage drivers based on hardware and then dynamically write the unattend.txt file on the fly and launch the installation. I don't see this as a viable solution for w2k8. All your help is much appreciated.

As I posted previously, I come from the school of W2k3 scripted unattended installations. We like the flexibility of changing on the fly. Now, What should I be focusing on with Either Vista or Server 2008 for scripted unattended installations via a network share. In the past I created the $oem$ and $$ and $1 directories and put all the information in there. I have been reading about configuration sets, but I am not quite sure I 100% understand this. I basically have network shares that usually store our source files globally, so how can I do this with Windows 2008?

Hey All - I am working on getting Windows 2008 Automated so I am getting familiar the night and day differences in Unattend.txt and unattend.xml using WSIM. My question is, we use Altiris Deployment Solution with Altiris Notification Server configured with regionalized Package Servers to distribute software based on AD Sites and Subnets. So, in the past we determine the local package server and then pull the installation files from the local repository. With the old Windows unattended installation it didn't care where the install was from. But with the new unattend.xml, I am not 100% how that works. I see traces of the Install.wim file location. If that is the case I need to dynamically update this file. Any help on where I can locate the source files and update the xml file would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

I don't see an issue with it. I am not quite sure why you are using the id=byte/guid. Please explain. I assume you are doing desktops so you don't know need dynamically find the primary disk ID.

Jaz - I am going to reconfirm, but I think I added all those drivers...