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Anyone else try getting the above post information to work. It looks like there is a built in way to change the theme by using the .xml files, but I'm not having much luck with it. I had this in Pass 4. <Themes> <ThemeName>C:\scripts\my.themepack</ThemeName> </Themes> I am trying to use a themepack as opposed to a .theme but it seems like this should work as well.

The thread was very helpful in sorting out video drivers for various machines. It may be nice to have the basic info from it stickied at the top of the forum.

Tks for the help on this, sounds like a few workable options.

In regards to the extra user acct, if you have the administrator account enabled, can you set the line in unattend.xml for creating a new acct to Administrator, and it skips the acct creation and just uses the admin acct that was already there.

I'm not really clear on why things are working this way, but the 32bit pe cd I had built from Win Vista a while back was auto assigning C to the system partition when I was trying to create it, when using a 64bit pe cd built from the Win 7 WAIK it's working as you said it should.

/forceunsigned is used when adding drivers to a .wim file. It would not be used in unattend.xml

From what I can tell there are basically two ways to add drivers. Directly to a .wim file, or have machines boot into audit mode. Using audit mode you can just specify a path and it will look for them in this folder. I was never able to determine a way to have it auto install unsigned drivers when using the audit path method so I ended up adding all of mine to the .wim file. Still having issues with some drivers though, I started another post this morning about how to extract drivers from an .exe file that I just can't seem to figure out.

Things are moving along pretty well with my Win 7 Image project, but I'm running into a problem trying to integrate one particular driver file. http://www.authentec.com/win7beta64.cfm It's the fingerprint driver for some of the laptops I'm working with, and I can't determine any way to extract the .inf file so that I could integrate it into a .wim. It basically just wants to install itself, and I haven't been able to tell any temp folder that it extracts files to, or by looking at the driver files on the actual device after it's installed it just list 2 .dlls and a .sys file. Also wondering if there is any way to get the actual driver package that is pulled down from Win updates? There is an infrared driver that I can't seem to find anywhere, but Windows updates downloads/installs it fine. Any help appreciated.

Much obliged, lots more to work toward today. Started with building a quick 64bit winpe and machine is booting after using the bcdboot 64bit version which is a positive. Think things are finally pulling together. In regards to drivers I was looking at the option to have machines first come out of a sysprep /audit /generalize and use the driverpath option in audit boot to have a folder with the needed drivers for all the machines I need to support, and just have it scripted to sysprep /oobe /reboot sysprep once the drivers had been loaded up. I may need to add in more supported models down the road and this seems like the simplest way to be able to add to the driver store. Again greatly appreciate the help.

I should have been a bit clearer with my questions I think. The first thing I was wondering when installing the OS, do you go ahead and create a user acct and use that acct to setup the machine, or do you boot only into audit boot and do everything from here. Driver wise it seems like a lot of people run sysprep /generalize /audit /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml then capture the image from here. After applying it back to a machine in the xml file it boots into audit mode loading all the drivers it needs for the particular machine by adding a driver path to the audit boot part. After that's done its scripted to reboot into the /oobe mode. The other way seems to be running sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml then capturing the image. At that point adding all your drivers to the .wim file. Then when you apply the wim it boots directly into the oobe and loads drivers that are included in the .wim rather then from a driver path. I'm not really sure which way is the preferred method or if they are both fine. In regards to the diskpart script, when you create the first partition diskpart auto assigns c: so it isn't really accepting it when you try to assign it to the 2nd partition. At least that's how it's working on the machine i'm looking at now. I also would have though the 2nd partition you are creating is the one that needs to be active? I'm testing a few things now, just created 1 partition made it active and I'm applying the wim to it. The version I'm using is Enterprise which is essentially the ultimate edition with a vlk, and it does create the 100meg service partition. It seems reasonable that this would need to be reapplied for whatever reason MS set it up to begin with although I'm not terribly sure what that is. It does look like there aren't any actual files in the partition so maybe just creating it like you had in the example is all that needs done I suppose, I would just like to have a bit better feel for whats going on with it if I'm going to use this on client machines. One final question, the pe cd i'm using is win32 and the wim is 64bit, so the bcdboot.exe program give errors about it not being the correct version. I tried the other one located in the really long folder c:\windows\winsxs\amd64_longpathhere\bcdboot.exe as well with the same result Greatly appreciated your help.

I'm not sure it's even possible to create a custom language pack, but to add them in check this post. It references adding language packs on the 2nd page. http://www.msfn.org/board/windows-7-dism-d...es-t131542.html

There are lots of post here about options and methods etc, I was hoping I might get a bit of feedback about the process I'm trying to use. Objective is to have an image that can be used on maybe 10 different models of Lenovo laptops, with drivers for each type. Process: Install Win 7 64bit Enterprise Boot into audit mode Install drivers for machine i'm building it on (this saves a few steps in adding these drivers later) Install applications, updates, Office, ff, tb, a few others Sysprep machine /oobe /generalize /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml Capture into a .wim file Mount .wim and add any drivers I need for other models using dsim. Apply the .wim file to machines as needed. Issues: After booting into audit mode and installing office, plus making some secpol.msc changes and windows updates, when the machine rebooted it got to a screen that said something to the effect that windows installation failed and to please try it again. I'm also not really sure what others are doing with the 100meg Win 7 service partition in regards to capturing it with image x and applying it back. Any help on the process or why I might be getting this error appreciated.

I've been working on this a bit more, it seems like adding drivers to the wim files is really what most are doing. I'm not terribly pleased with that option and would much prefer to be able to dump drivers into a network share and when machines boot up out of sysprep they check the folder and install anything it needs, rather then having to mount, install, unmount a wim file everytime i want to change a driver. Bit more looking and that audit path is working properly now. From what I can tell you need to run sysprep /audit /generlize /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml then capture the image at that point. When you apply the image to a new machine it will boot into audit mode using the folder path you specified in the xml file, then you need to have a synrun command that will tell it to sysprep /oobe /reboot and it will reboot after installing all the drivers you had in the path. Closing in on a done project with this, right now I'm hunting for a way to tell win to just accept drivers that are not signed, as a lot of the ones I'm having to use are Vista drivers which it is prompting to install everyone. I think I read a post on here about that somewhere, just gotta hunt it down.

That site doesn't really mention how people are handling the 100meg service partition that win7 sets up. I'm still not very clear on what it even does, I've heard it a built in bootable winpe partition, or that it has something to do with efi booting. Since imagex will only do partitions, it seems like somehow this one needs to be captured and put back down, but i'm not to clear on how the partition should be setup.

Still no luck using the audit pass. Basically what I'm trying to do, is build an image from a particular machine, and use this image on several different ones. However, I don't know the exact other machines so I need to be able to add drivers whenever vs adding them to a .wim file in which it seems like i could just dump whatever into the C:\temp folder that I was specifying in the unattend.xml file and it would load drivers from there, but for some reason it is not using the stuff in that folder when it comes out of sysprep. After reading about this a bit more the sysprep command i was running is "sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown /unattend:Win_7.xml" in which case I don't think it would pay any attention to something in the audit part of the xml file since it is not entering that mode. This would explain why it isn't picking up those drivers I think. So basically asking for ideas here, want to build an image on one machine, then sysprep this one, capture a ghost image of it and be able to dump it on whatever machine. When it boots I need it to check a folder for drivers and fix anything that was missing, then boot into windows. I have all unattend options filled out in the xml file so it does boot into windows, it just isn't handling the drivers part which I don't really see any options on how to do that.