MrJinje

try mapping your drive to a letter first.

in that case, then your next easiest choice will be to just use one of your other Public IP's. That way you don't need to fumble with port-forwarding and changing the RDP listening port. Plus your users will have no clue about the other server.

The easy method to connect to multiple behind router targets, is to turn one of your servers into a VPN gateway. Then after the VPN is established you can connect directly to each server as if they were on the local lan. (by specifying the internal IP address 192.168.2.101 or 192.168.2.100)

Your kidding me right ? The way to "stuff" the modified files back into the Install.wim is by hitting the Commit button. Which I am pretty sure you mention doing in your very first post. My bad for not knowing what you were talking about, but at first glance I thought you were already done. So my guess is they are already stuffed. Did you try re-building your ISO with the modified Install.wim, that is the next step.

Let it be known that DISM Tool™ is not for people looking for something that can replace vLite. There are plenty of other stickies with user friendly GUI's attempting to clone vLite's interface/capabilities. If you wait until Saturday, Bensam56 is releasing the next version of 7Lite, it is more of a vLite replacement than DISM Tool™ and FYI. Use PowerISO to make your ISO, not edit your WIM. What you do is open your .ISO file with PowerISO, then you dragon-drop your modified WIM (the one you mentioned in your first post) into your ISO and save as a new ISO file.

Keep the Boot, EFI, Sources folder + the bootmgr at the root of the DVD. + Safe to delete the extra .clg files.

No you don't. Can instead just copy your XRM-MS here in your OEM folders and Windows will find it. DVD\Sources\$OEM$\$$\System32\OEM\cert.xrm-ms If the cert file is in that folder, then Microsoft will find it and use it.

All this can do is edit your install.wim and boot.wim files. This cannot make you a new install disk, after you integrate your drivers/updates using DISM, then use PowerISO or OSCDIMG.exe from the WAIK to create a new ISO. Easy way is to install them into a live OS, then use something like Driver Magician Lite to export them. Here is the link for the portable version. http://www.drivermagician.com/PortableDML.zip If the LManager is an application and not a driver it may not work, but you will definitely be able to export your chipset drivers from a live OS

C: drive oranges, now your catching on, when you mount your WIM the files inside the mount folder are actually your C: drive. Any changes you make will show up in your installation as the new C: drive. That's the secret, Install.wim is the C: drive. Not sure told you it looks like the DVD sources folders, but it doesn't. Apples, Oranges, I'd rather pluck a Peach any day of the week.

No clue, if you have questions about unattended 2000, HFSLIP, or nlite you might want to stop by those sub-forums. Wouldn't hurt to take a look at this thread and go through each update one by one to determine if you want to include them. But that sounds like a waste of time time to me. If I was you, I would simply download them all, try to integrate them with nLite and see if I get any errors. What's the worst that could happen, you have to start over again, nlite should know what to do with each file. (or at least warn you it is not supported) Where'd you download your update list from, is this from jcarles website or somebody elses list ? Here's another good link

Let me get this straight, you were expecting to see an installation of Windows, but what you in fact saw was an installation of Windows. LOL, "These aren't the droids files I'm looking for". Quit playing jedi mind tricks on yourself. and FYI, those are the files your looking for. What you can do with them is Copy/Paste any files you want into the system. Any changes you make in the mount will be a part of the next install. (after you commit changes) Maybe you want to delete useless shortcuts from the start menu, or copy a portable application into the Program Files folder, I dont know, get creative.

But DISM Tool™ requires Powershell. First rule of MSFN you do not delete Powershell. Second rule of MSFN you do not delete Powershell. J/K, looks like you save about 200Mb or so, that sounds about right.

depends on what 500 Mb of files you deleted. If you forgot to delete the backups in the winsxs folder you will not see any size reduction. For instance, there are 3000 printer driver files in the winsxs folder, and an identical set of 3000 files in the Drivers\File Repository\ folder. Unless you delete both copies, it doesn't really do much. Then to top that off, there is the matter of compression. An 8Gb image fits on a 2.33 Gb WIM because it is compressed at least 60%-70%. This means if you delete 1 Gb of files, you might only see 300Mb of reduction. But this is further exacerbated by many files being extremely compressed (taking nearly 1 to 1 space inside the wim) and others being easy to compress text files. The winRE.wim file inside the system32 folder is a 150 Mb file and removing it reduces size by 150Mb because it cannot be compressed much further. On the other hand, if you deleted thousands of text files that can be compressed to 90% or higher, removing them doesn't really reduce the WIM much. FYI, on a 2.3 Gb x86 WIM, I had to remove close to 5Gb of files to get the WIM near 1Gb in size. and of course you should be using the /MAXIMUM compression setting, you are trying to reduce the wim are you not ??? Fast is for people who don't care what size the WIM is.

That's tough, unfortunately you cannot avoid creating a user, the preferred method is to create a dummy user account via your XML (this avoids the prompt during install), then (using setupcomplete.cmd) delete the dummy account and enable the admin account. See this ancient thread starting at post #7. Microsoft might be able to force you to create an account, but they cannot stop you from deleting afterwards. SetupComplete.cmd NET USER Administrator /active:yes NET USER DummyAccount /DELETE Also you don't need the auto-login reg setting if you already do it from the XML. FYI, this is easier than being at the computer hitting ctrl + alt + f2 every installation. (or is it shift + f10)

Cool, wondering if it wouldn't be more useful to append the size to the end of the feature name (so we can see them all at once) _________________________________________________________________________________ Also wondering if you want to create a section where people can import HKCU .reg files, and then 7Lite could mount/merge them into the default users hive. This way end-users have quick method to add their own personal reg-tweaks. Basically it would need to edit the reg to match the hive mount point (in this case HKEY_USERS\TEST) before importing. Does that sound plausible ? User would import a reg file looking like this. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"="1" and 7Lite should mount the hive and change the registry key like this before merging the settings. (simple text replace) Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_USERS\TEST\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"="1" Just an idea.

Check out Acronis Universal Restore.

That is exactly the problem the UnattendedJoin occurs before the Name change and he is getting random names in his OU. Plus he needs to be able to use the same install DVD and have the OU magically translated to the proper sub-OU in his domain. What we do in the office (65,000+ desktops worldwide) is place all machines into the same provisional OU, and then use Altiris Agent (it's kinda like a rich man's PSEXEC) to run a few remote scripts after the build process is finished. It is much easier for us to handle this stuff outside of our image as we need to be able to update the scripts often. The Unattend.xml method seems like it was designed to benefit smaller companies who cannot afford to do a little manual scripting. (M$ has no remorse over making us do things the hard way. I view it as Job Security) EDIT. We kinda do the same thing naming wise, ours is a two digit state code, followed by three digit city code, then the first 10 digits of Asset Tag or serial number. Makes it easy to guess which office the machine is from. For convenience we rename after the computer has joined the domain i.e. TXHOU********** is a machine in Houston Texas, AZPHX*** is the Pheonix office, SPMAD might be in Spain. Scales really well.

The easiest thing to do would be to change your policy and retain your backups for a full year. Then the January task could delete the old January backup and so on. I don't think you can schedule multi month triggers with the old version of task scheduler. (only in vista/2008 server or higher) You might be forced to schedule 12 separate monthly jobs. + 12 cleanup jobs that run 6 months later. Kinda kludgy if you ask me. Otherwise, you might think about creating a single monthly task calling a VBS script that contains the trigger logic you need. This is a limitation of the old task scheduler.

Yep, use Token Restore in your situation. That will preserve your sticker based activation. If that is not good enough, the only alternative might be to restore the bloatware factory install that came on the machine when you bought it. But since you already did clean install + activated with your sticker key, it will be much quicker to just use Token Restore instead.

Had I known it would be that simple, I would have started my own 7Lite Tool™ back in August. At least this way, I don't have to do any work, much easier to just push Ben in the right direction. LOL, unless reducing WIM size isn't a priority for 7Lite.

To answer the OP's question. (without railroading him) Try a group policy to push a theme silently. or try some of the other settings in the personalization folder (inside GPEDIT) FYI, if you are not on a domain, this can be done via the registry as well

That only works for OEM computers that came with Windows 7 originally. See this article If you have an Windows 7 OEM computer you might be able to find the proper certificate in your "C:\Windows\System32\OEM" folder. As for the OEM key, do not use the one on your sticker. That will not work because that key is retail COA not OEM:SLP. Run a product key checking tool on the machine to determine what Product Key your machine is really using, then use that key. Otherwise, if you do not have a Windows 7 OEM machine, forget it, that method will not work for you (but driver integration still should).

I guess you could give DISM Tool™ a shot. Link below.

Try same image on a different machine, I know the HDD speed plays a small part, but under no circumstance should it be taking half an hour. Maybe you should use Resource Monitor and see what kind of disk activity is going on during the un-mount, it may turn out to be something else is using the disk causing the slowdown. (or not) but you won't know until you check.

Coffee might be on to something with the Network Discovery. That seems plausible in M$ realm. But if it is only happening during reboots (you never specified when it is happening), then maybe it's just a PXE enabled NIC sending a few DISC packets during BIOS stage.... No harm if that is the case. Like they said, I wouldn't be worried until you see DHCPOFFER and DHCPACK packets.