bj-kaiser

you might want to look at the "wdsutil.exe" utility (if I remembered the name right) and pxelinux or etherboot. wdsutil has an option to change the bootloader from the default one to anything else. so, you can use pxelinux and there is almost nothing that it cant boot. you can even chainload the original MS bootloader to be able to boot windows PE. (thats the way i do it actually for flexibility.) although my setup usually is a linux box with dnsmasq + tftp. (and with recent versions, dnsmasq comes with integrated tftp.) -- http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742071.aspx

I was just thinking that you might wanted to boot something other than RIS over PXE. (for which you would need to use another bootloader than the MS one.) But since this isn't the case, you should be fine with a knowledge base article or walkthrough from Microsoft. I honestly never used RIS/WDS. but it should be fairly simple to set up. The images you want to deploy are another topic. --edit-- that link should give you a bit of overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc671163.aspx

you dont need much more to net/PXE-boot then basic DNS, DHCP and TFTP setup. All of which should come with W2k3. Is there a specific reason you use the 3com software?

well, that should leave enough room beside the ramdisk for "scratch space" and applications. ok, was just a stab in the dark. can you run memtest on that machine? I have had weird errors with defective RAM sometimes.

how big is your image?

i just looked at my favourite electronics reseller. they have a adapter from slim-ide to sata. http://www.reichelt.de/?;ARTICLE=79774 no idea about the vendor though. just letting you know the thing exists. edit: seems i found it, its called "PA-CDST" and made by Ably-Tech. http://www.ably.com.tw/pdt/viewpdt.asp?abs...t=CHASSIS_PARTS

do you really want to run it on a XP box? Or could you use some spare hardware and run OpenWrt or m0n0wall on it? -- http://m0n0.ch/wall/ http://openwrt.org/

this would give me an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iscsi#Concepts So if I understand it right, either a piece of software or hardware speaks to the net and all your windows sees is a SCSI adapter. I guess its just a matter of drivers.

here is a glimpse of what "strings TeamViewer_Setup.exe" gave me: ><assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="X86" name="Nullsoft.NSIS.exehead" type="win32"/> Now take a wild guess.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/f...trolCommand.htm try using "SelectString".

um, how about NwDsk? If XP can be installed with winnt.exe and DOS, why not 2000?

http://veder.com/nwdsk/ or a PXE-stack on a floppy can be helpful. (etherboot.org)

are you sure that isnt a hardware issue? I had that at a workplace pc, the user broke out the plastic tray holding the contacts, causing a short circuit whenever something was plugged into that port. Just an idea.

better use $ID = @ProgramFilesDir & "\Multimedia\Nero8" ? Thank for your help. Macros (@...) dont come with trailing backslash! And strings are enclosed in one set of quotes only.

Personally I'd favor imagex there. alone for the fact it is scriptable.

Not what my experience shows. I have had sysprep die on me after the third time of sysyprepping it. we have had one image that was sysprepped once and it was fine, we resysprepped it 2 more times, and it kept at different points on the very same computer. I think I found the article where I had the idea, of sysprep having a limited number of runs on one installation, from: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308554 However, I could swear something like that happened to me even with VLK media. But I didn't find any information on that, yet.

So with that process how would I modify an existing image? or is it a once you are done, you are done, theres no going back to make modifications except with something like Autoit? The idea is to use the "factory mode" for modifications and the "gold" image if you ever have to start from scratch, so you dont have to wait for the normal setup process, even if its unattended it usually takes longer than applying an image with imagex. And after the modifications you just sysprep again with the same sysprep.inf and capture that as the new sysprepped image. That's about what I remember, but honestly, it should all be explained in detail in the deployment tools docs.

well actually I would make one image without anything other than the setup settings you want, so just a clean windows installation. second would be a factory mode image. and third a resealed image. for the counter you should read the docs coming with the deployment utilities archive. I cant remember right now how often you can run sysprep one after another but there is some limitation to it. as for you application, AutoIt is freeware and has a script generator, so essentially you run the install, click through it and at the end of that you have a script that has the buttons recorded as you clicked them. however there is one catch, the AutoIt "suite" comes with 2 script generators, one is control/button based, the other records mousemoves. I will look at it tomorrow, but I think the control-based script generator was called "autoit macro recorder" or something like that. -- http://www.autoitscript.com/

you know how long xp setup takes? if you only image XP ("gold"), it takes you about a minute to apply the image (disk to disk). So you would be able to almost instantly reset your machine/vm to the state after setup. "factory" is actually meant for updating/adding drivers, preinstall software and generally modify the image before resealing it. In this stage you could use scripts to install your software, as to be able to reproduce the final sysprepped image. so all in all it shouldn't hurt to have those 3 images, especially since it shouldnt take more than some megabytes of space on the disk (well, more for the applications). btw for the question in the original post; sysprep actually has a counter somewhere in the registry IIRC, so after you run it 7 times one after another, it will bring up some error message. I guess MS has reasons for this.

IIRC thats the way Microsoft recommends, one "gold" image, one "factory" and one "sysprepped" image. And with WIMs you dont even waste so much space, since you will only add changed files to the image if you capture append to the same file. (or at least thats how i understand the docs) Personally I'd use a VM for creating the image, VMware, VirtualBox, VirtualPC, you name it.

well, you can do some tricks and replace the text mode setup with WinPE and imagex, and it will even work with RAID/SATA-Controllers in native mode. The trick here is sysprep and peimg.exe. you can make peimg believe the XP image is a PE image easily, which makes it possible to integrate disk drivers into the offline image. However, it is probably not supported, but for me it works.

you'd have to to it like this: $myvar = EnvGet("PATH") Send($myvar)

there is http://thinstation.sf.net or http://www.2x.com/pxes/, however, both are mainly a thin-client OS, that is, you get RDP, Citrix/ICA and NoMachine/NX clients by default. No VDI client. But nobody says you couldn't add it as long as there is a VDI client for linux-x86. And knowing VMware, there should be. And whatever way you look at it, WinPE you will have to customize to include the VDI client, same for any sort of linux. And the technical hurdles for linux are easier to take, since you dont need to jump through hoops to get it to boot by PXE. (Given you are a fan of simple config files like PXELINUX uses, as opposed to bcdedit.exe and the boot configuration storage with its GUIDs and whatnot) Not to forget the legal situation. Technically all you need to PXE-boot linux is a TFTP and DHCP server, maybe NFS too (depending on the distribution). For first experiments, you can use any linux distribution that provides the "dnsmasq" package, it is a combined DHCP, DNS-cache and TFTP server. Thinstation has a HowTo for adding your own package here: http://thinstation.wiki.sourceforge.net/Cr...our+own+package Edit: From a quick flight through some of VMware's websites it seems they use plain old RDP as protocol. Should be easy to try that out with ThinStation. HTH

You may run into legal problems there. The EULA states that WinPE is only licensed to install Windows, and specificly not to use as a ThinClient. Then again, we are in the EU here, and as long as you dont have signed a contract beforehand, the EULA is pretty much void. But you better hand some cash over to your lawyer of choice. (Err, well the swiss aren't in the EU, so better ask a lawyer on that)

"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Sorry, I couldnt help it. and to add something to the thread: the Acronis option I was talking about without knowing the exact name is called "one-click restore". From the Acronis TI Home v11 user guide: