decaflame

All, I figured it out. As jdeboeck and maxXPsoft had surmised, injecting the drivers into the image was the way to go. Once I did this the machines running SATA drives automatically picked up the driver. I guess the C:\drivers path I was specifying in the Audit pass is too late for Windows setup to use (or is only a secondary location to the c:\windows\system\inf folder). Thanks, -Chris

All, I've recently created a Vista WIM image for use across multiple machine types in my environment. The image installs correctly all machine types. However, after the image has come down on machines with SATA drives they blue screen during boot up and reboot over and over. If I switch the SATA mode in the BIOS from AHCI to ATA the machines are happy and work properly. I am copying the SATA AHCI drivers into the C:\drivers folder, and I know that the sysprep process looks in that location during Windows setup because other devices are installed correctly. If I look in Device Manager all devices show up as properly installed. However, the drives are not running in AHCI mode and I can't seem to get them to switch into AHCI mode, even after Vista has been installed. My question is "How can I get Vista to use the AHCI drivers during the Windows setup process?" WinPE sees the drives correctly even with the machine in AHCI mode, so I don't understand how it could suddenly not work after the image has come down and the Windows setup process has completed. Any help or advice is appreciated. -Chris

Martin, That's what I was afraid of hearing, but then what is the reseal command for? It seems like it was designed for exactly this sort of process. Or am I misunderstanding Microsoft's intention? -Deca

Yes, I've tried that as well as other members of the administrators group.

That's what I suggested as a potential workaround. Using it at first logon and as a synchronous command are synonomous in this case since either way I'm required to reboot an extra time. That's what I'm currently doing in an effort to just get the whole process unattended, but I'm really curious as to how others have gotten it working in their setups as part of the specialize pass and why mine doesn't work. -Deca

All, I've read numerous threads about the network location bug and have added the following synchronous command to the specialize pass in my unattend.xml: reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Signatures\FirstNetwork" /v Category /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000 /f The problem isn't with the command itself. I know the command is working because when I halt the computer during the auditsystem pass I can browse to the registry and see the value set. However, once the oobesystem pass goes through the reg key is deleted and so I end up getting prompted again. I've tried different entries into the Shell Setup > OOBE > Network Location field and also leaving it blank. None of these have worked and I always end up getting prompted. One way I can get around this is to add yet another synchronous command in the oobesystem section to add the registry key and then reboot, but I really don't want to add yet another reboot to fix this bug when others seem to have it working in the specialize pass. Can anyone point out what I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance, -Deca

All, I have what should be an easy problem to fix with regard to the auditsystem pass in an unattend.xml file I've created. I've created an image using sysprep.exe /generalize /audit and applied an unattend.xml with settings for third party drivers in the auditsystem pass. The driver application works correctly, but the computer will reboot into audituser and then just stop. It is prompting me with the sysprep GUI to reboot the machine into oobe mode but I want to automate that so that it goes there automatically. I don't really care whether it goes there directly from auditsystem or audituser, but I can't seem to get it to do that. Adding the Reseal option to audituser with forceshutdownnow = true and mode = oobe doesn't do anything. It's like it is ignoring that command. I can probably get around this by running a synchronous command in audituser of "sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot" (I noticed Fire doing this in his unattended Vista guide) but I'd rather do it using the unattend.xml components if possible. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Thona, I'm seeing this same error on a laptop client here. I think it has to do with the fact that the WinPE image doesn't have any NIC drivers for this laptop (as opposed to an issue with the DHCP server itself). I'm going to try and add the appropriate drivers into my winpe.wim file and have them enumerated and see if that doesn't fix the problem.

All, I think I am missing a fundamental understanding of how WDS works, so maybe someone can answer a few questions I have. I find the myriad of walkthroughs and help pages that come with the WAIK to be so confusing that I can't really get anything useful out of them. I have WDS set up and running and I've added both the default WinPE image to the boot images and 3 versions of Vista RTM to the install images on the WDS server. My question is, where do I go from here? Following the "Deploying an image using WDS" I should just be able to network boot to the WDS server, select the boot image (I only have one at the moment), and then click next to begin the installation. However, I can PXE boot and connect to the WDS server and it downloads the WinPE image but then it launches startnet.cmd and just sits. What does this have to do with picking one of my install.wim files from the Install Images section of the WDS server? One thing I could do is modify the WinPE image to change startnet.cmd to map a network drive and then run setup.exe with an autounattend.xml, but that defeats the purpose of the Install images in WDS. Also, when I tried to do that it was unable to because it had no NIC drivers (which I couldn't really figure out how to set up when reading through the documentation). I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction, so if someone could point out some things that might help or something that I'm doing wrong it'd be appreciated Thanks in advance.