cluberti

That would not be an order update, then, it would be the fact that the prereqs aren't ready during staging. Well, OK, it's an order thing (if the updates had applied the prereqs would be available), but that doesn't matter if you're dumping them all in - any update that requires a previous update to be installed (or any updates that modify the servicing engine itself) shouldn't be added offline anyway, due to the very fact that they require other components to have been updated first (which is impossible during setup).

CurrentControlSet is the current running boot, and it's saved to ControlSet00x when you shut down. When you boot, the last ControlSet00x that was used is used again, and the CurrentControlSet you see in the registry is actually just a symlink to the ControlSet00x that was booted from. After a successful boot sequence, another ControlSet00x is created (or overwritten) as a backup of the currently loaded ControlSet to be used as the Last Known Good control set to be used with the Last Known Good boot option. Microsoft talks about it in a KB article here.

Rule following fail, rule 1.a even. Discussion of warez in relation to a post, even if it isn't the main crux of the discussion, is verboten as per the rules. Sorry mate, banned.

You need to run sysprep on the parent VM (and don't install any roles beforehand - just install the OS, patch, and run sysprep). Once sysprep completes and shuts down the VM, you will now have your "parent" VHD you can use to create new VM copies or differencing disks off of. You can use dism from the command line to enable/install roles if you want to do it in an automated fashion later on, or you can simply use the GUI if it isn't a server core OS (but for DCs, I would strongly recommend considering server core, especially virtualized hosts).

1 - unfortunately, no. Windows XP only legally allows one interactive session at a time (as does Vista, 7, etc). If you want terminal services, you have to pay for a server license and install that. 2 - reliable is relative, but if you mean a direct VPN connection to the client, no - this would require server (as above) or dedicated hardware to handle endpoint connectivity. 3 - If you can already make connections (and can pass port 3389 or another configured port already), then this isn't really necessary. If you want multiple logins, though, you need server. Client can do this if illegally hacked, but we don't discuss things of that nature here, and it will likely cause system instability anyway (and I don't think that's desired on something as important as a POS system).

User-friendliness isn't one of diskpart's goals - it's meant to be a scriptable environment for modifying disks, and also for use on core versions of Windows Server that have no UI (there are other reasons for diskpart to exist, as not everything you can do in diskpart can you do in disk management). As to creating partitions, you would run diskpart via the diskpart command from an elevated cmd prompt, then you would select the disk to be partitioned: list disk sel disk <disk # from list>If the selected disk has data you wish to destry, you can use the clean command to do so: help cleanOnce you've selected the disk, you create partitions using the create partition (create par) commands: help create par pri From there, you can now manipulate the volumes in disk management. You can also use the volume commands (help vol) in diskpart to do it manually, if you so prefer.

Please ping xper with a PM on this.

You can't - it creates the 4th as a logical extended partition automatically so that you can create more partitions inside the logical partition. If you want 4 *primary* partitions, you have to use diskpart.

Well, considering GPT doesn't have MBR limitations and doesn't need extended partitions to get around them, I'm not sure why you'd create an extended partition in a GPT volume anyway: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525

Indeed - this update modifies the servicing engine, and if you do this while installing or staging any other updates (that *includes running setup for Windows itself*), you could break Windows. This one just should not be added offline, and should be installed as part of setup post-sysprep.

Actually, that issue is fixed in App-V 4.6 SP1 with hotfix package 4 applied. If you aren't there already, get those installed and re-test. Assuming you're not pulling down new packages to cache from App-V during the trace, that should go away.

Be careful removing IE entirely - Windows Update no longer uses IE for downloading or installing updates, but if you don't install IE that means you won't be installing wininet or urlmon binaries, which WinHTTP uses from time to time to do connection-based security and zone lookups. Not having those binaries can actually cause issues with WinHTTP apps (like Windows Update). It's not a guarantee, but it's still possible too. Also, any applications that host the WebBrowser Control (WebOC) will not be able to display anything, as mshtml will not be on the system either. I am usually all for doing what you want (hey, it's your box after all ), but removal of IE from a Windows system isn't necessarily a wise way to go, as other components rely a lot on certain IE components for functionality (even including Explorer). If you don't use it, it is probably better (functionality-wise) to simply leave the latest version installed (IE8) and patch it regularly. This way it stays patched, you still have the necessary supporting components on the system that IE provides, and you can still use whatever browser you want other than IE. I can't speak to Media Player removal, although that would remove default codecs and handlers from Explorer that you'd have to replace with something else. It's not as critical as removing IE though (Microsoft provides a version (Windows XP N) without WMP for the EU already).

That's what I had mentioned earlier, although that would require VM-capable hardware (host-based virtualization wouldn't necessarily be a good idea here for a migration perf-wise), which has already been discounted due to not being able to acquire new hardware.

Seems more like a software problem than a hardware one - you could try a repair install using the XP installation disc, although that might entail reinstalling some hotfixes.

Yeah, possibly - it sounds like upgrades for 3 different forests (potentially different companies, I would surmise), and I tend to use Hyper-V in that scenario for migration (put the DCs on the Hyper-V box temporarily until the physical hardware can be replaced/upgraded/whatever). It can be permanent too, although yes, that is more server consolidation. Good luck to you - please do let us know how it goes.

Microsoft has a whole series of Technet articles on directory services upgrades.Again, if I were you, I would *strongly* recommend they migrage and pony up for new hardware (even temporarily). Otherwise, you need to make sure they're aware that there WILL be downtime during the transition, as you will need to take full backups (disk2vhd is a good method, assuming the Windows partitions are 127GB or smaller) of EVERY DC IN THE ENVIRONMENT AT THE SAME TIME, and then migrate, carefully, one DC at a time (waiting between upgrades to make sure replication, auth, etc. are all still working after each DC is physically upgraded to the next OS. Also, given you may be going from 2000 to 2003, and then from 2003 to 2008 or 2008 R2, you will need to do everything TWICE, including a full environment backup of the 2000 environment, upgrading each and every DC (one at a time) pausing between each upgrade to make sure everything is working on each DC post-OS upgrade, and then (once you're at 2003 across the board) doing everything a second time (including a full environment backup of each DC).

This. That's the only way I would do it personally. And with a virtualization platform too (vSphere or Hyper-V). Considering 2008 R2 comes with Hyper-V, and if the OP uses an enterprise or datacenter license, the first 4 VMs (or all of them, in datacenter's case) would be freely licensed), that would be the obvious choice in this case, at least to me.

You can only upgrade from 2003 to 2008 (and yes, you must stick to x86 unless your 2003 servers are x64), so you'd need to upgrade to 2003 first on all your domain controllers. This is one of the many reasons you should do *new installs* of 2008 R2 (x64) and migrate, rather than in-place upgrade as we've recommended .

jaclaz is spot on - if you treat an SSD like any other HDD when it comes to the data on it (anything important should be backed up at least once somewhere else), you'll be fine.

No, I'm saying there was a change in XP SP2 which made the difference. However, booting to a volume with larger than 4K clusters is generally a performance and disk space waste - data volumes with large file sizes are really the only way that larger clusters will make a large difference, and XP isn't really designed to be booted from a drive like that. It can use them, sure, but booting from one isn't as nice.

Of course it is possible, but you should plan carefully to avoid downtime if you don't simply install new servers and migrate.

Unless you have an XP RTM or SP1 installation media disc, this is going to fail. There are ways to make it work (usually by copying certain files from an SP1 i386 folder over the SP2 or SP3 versions before install), but note that any update that updates these files will hose your installation afterwards anyway. What are the reasons for installing XP onto a volume with larger than 4K NTFS clusters anyway?

Welcome back

You can add .MSU packages offline at any time - nothing is actually happening to the image itself when you modify it offline. The specialization of the image (removing components, adding packages, etc) happens during setup itself after the OS image is applied to the disk.