jazz127

Thanks for these links, its certainly given me some ideas as well as confirmed a few things. I certainly liked the jist of MySysprep although Scrapple made a good argument that drivers etc would ideally be kept external to the image. This is how I had envisioned it to work with the scripts. Accessing the network to download a .wim to apply to the system drive was one of the ideas I had. Which .wim to apply could be determined by a few different methods including SMBIOS (as confirmed by your link) or lookup in a database / textfile somewhere. Keep it coming guys.

Hello, First post, so be nice. I wanted to try and get some feedback on something I've come up with. Pretty new to the game so forgive me if i've missed something obvious. Reasoning behind this, we have 500+ pc's in a lab environment. A lab is a particular make and model however, makes and model of pc various between labs. Different HALS, similar devices that each require the manufacturers version to work reliably. A very limitied budget preventing me from a commerical soloution such as Altiris or SMS. All the fun stuff. SO... Theres two goals here. One being Zero Touch Installation or as close to it as possible (ie. press F12 to network boot), secondly, a Single Master Image for all the different types of PC's (currently something I haven't been able to achieve due to my requirements for different sysprep.infs). With the tools mentioned in the topic, and a usefull feature in Dell BIOS's ... Wake on Lan with Boot to PXE, I've been able to achieve Z.T.I. WDS provides an automatic boot image of WinPE which includes scripts to start ghost and a nifty script i've come up with that edits sysprep.inf and replaces it with a name matched to MAC address on a network accessible text file. Given our environment, our PC names are important to us and i've never been able to settle for randomized names or automatically generated ones, this now allows me to fully automate the sysprep process. This got me thinking that this method might just solve my single master image holdup as well. By including a code with my MAC address i've been able to subsititute different sysprep.infs & drivers for different machines. I thought about automatically detecting the make and model of the PC which also seems entirely possible thanks to scripting & WMI. I've got to say being able to script access and modification to a freshly ghosted drive, before mini-setup starts is a godsend to me. We've used NTFS to create the images & So the questions i ask of you guys.... 1. What do you think so far? Is there a far easier (must be free or included with your general Microsoft licenses), soloution that I should be looking at? 2. What are some of the other funky things people are doing with scripts in WinPE in the context of installing / ghosting XP? Essentially are there more goodies I havent thought of yet 3. If you do like my method of swapping out syspreps, do you think an application to manage them all & autogenerate scripts required etc. is warranted / required ? Thanks for your interest