bj-kaiser
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Posts posted by bj-kaiser
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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.
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how big is your image?
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/f...trolCommand.htm
try using "SelectString".
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...but anyone know a way to slap windows 2k on there? someone was telling me about a way that you could install the cab files onto the hdd like from another machine then have a boot disk that would run/extract them? but they only knew of one for windows ME.
um, how about NwDsk? If XP can be installed with winnt.exe and DOS, why not 2000?
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or a PXE-stack on a floppy can be helpful. (etherboot.org)
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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.
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...
$ID = "@ProgramFilesDir & "Multimedia\Nero8"" ? Thank for your help.
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.
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Personally I'd favor imagex there. alone for the fact it is scriptable.
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While I cannot speak for Vista, as far as XP goes, you can run sysprep until you tire of it, and it's not a problem. I've seen images that were sysprep'ed probably 50+ times, without any issues at all.
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.
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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.
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.
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So it sounds like the best process is to:
1Create the image with the settings I want, applications I want, etc.
2Sysprep it with Factory Setting
3Take an image
4Sysprep it with Reseal
5Take an image
6Use the Reseal for deployment through MDT
If I want to modify it:
1lay the sysprep factory
2modify the image (change settings, install applications, etc.)
3sysprep with factory
4take an image
5sysprep it with reseal
6take an image
7deploy the resealed image through MDT
Yes? or No?
If it adds a count to the sysprep each time, is it just the reseal or is it in any mode of sysprep?
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My big issue with scripting applications is that our in house application is setup by hand, there is not automated installer, as well that we do not have any scripting software, or the time to take our applications from hands on to silent/automated.
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.
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What do you mean by one "gold" "Factory" and "sysprepped" image? How would that work?
Setup everything, take an image
Sysprep factory seal it, take an image
Sysprep regular and take an image
What would I use the different images for?
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.
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Would it be better to recreate the image from scratch, and take an image of it BEFORE sysprep (using Acronis, or similar), and just make the modifications as needed in the future by applying that image to the same type of machine?
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.
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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.
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you'd have to to it like this:
$myvar = EnvGet("PATH")
Send($myvar)0 -
Thanks for your answer. I didn't check the legal situation yet. I think I'll do that. However, maybe it's easier to do that with Linux. No legal issues there...
How does it look from the technical site?
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
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Hi,
I'm not very advanced in WinPE. To be honest, I created my first WinPE 2.0 yesterday.... Now I'm stuck in what I'd like to do and want to know if I'm on the correct path or completely wrong and of course I'm looking for help and ideas.
What I'd like to do:
I want to boot a Operating System image (WinPE) over PXE and automatically start a graphical MWare client, which then connects to a VMWare connection manager. Then a Virtual Desktop is provided to the user.
Why I need to do this:
The user's PC will be shared, so they only can work with a virtual Image. Nothing should be installed on the PC (And in the future Thinclient) to reduce the risk that the user start to play around in the physical PC.
Is this possible using WinPE? Or am I on the completly wrong path?
What I did:
I created a WinPE and it started without problems. I also tried to find out how I can include the VMWare client to WinPE, but I could not figure out how to do this (Is there somewhere a good tutorial which explains how to do that?).
Thanks four your help
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)
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I certainly didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition
"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:
The Acronis One-Click Restore is a minimal addition to your rescue media, allowing oneclickdata recovery from an image archive stored on this media. This means that at booting
from the media and clicking “restore,” all data will be restored to its original place
automatically. No options or selections such as resizing partitions will be available.
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and you still forgot one thing:
imagex.exe
which is easily scriptable (because it is a commandline program) and 'free'. free as in, you need to download the 1 GB WAIK and have to build a Windows PE image.
Or you can use Acronis. I have a TrueImage 10 License, but I didnt really use it. However, IIRC you can create a rescue-cd/dvd with a system image which will be automatically restored (after you answer 1 question "do you really want to do so"). However, I'd recommend to read the helpfile of the demo or other support material or send a mail to acronis to verify this.
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You're right, by WIMing the Ext you loose ACLs. Has anyone managed to get WDS to use pxelinux?
Doesn't look so hard to me. The link I posted tells you how to specify a different network bootloader for a specific machine. So unless it checks for a MS signed loader, you can tell it to use "\Boot\pxelinux.0", put the file and pxelinux.cfg folder into \Boot and that should be it.
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setting up PXE on windows 2003
in Microsoft Office
Posted
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?