valkenaer

Hi all, We have a working Windows XP SP3 image that contains a customized Office 2007 installation (predefined server, profile name, etc). Recently our corporate mail server got a new DNS name. Is there a way to change the predefined server address in the mounted WIM image? many thanks in advance! kind regards,

Thanks for moving my question to the correct forum; I'll try and see if can wrangle a sysprep answer file that fits my needs out of WSIM. I assume there's a way of deleting the xml file after setup? Bless Microsoft for supplying the admin with tools to fully customize the Windows installation and deployment, but I definitely preferred the simple unattended approach used in the XP/2003 family :-)

Our desktop support team use a basic but effective combination of imagex.exe and a winpe pxe boot image to deliver Windows XP SP3 to new computers. The process is as follows: * prepopulate computer account in Active Directory * PXE boot, choose image from menu * apply sysprepped wim image to computer (ComputerName is not provided in sysprep.inf) * have end user supply computer name in mini-setup * automatic domain join, reboot, gpo software installation and everything is hunky dory :-) I would like to use the exact same method for deploying Windows 7. The first question: is that even possible? It looks like providing a plain text password to join Windows 7 to the domain in the unattended/sysprep file is frowned upon. Does anyone have experience in this "basic" deployment or should I not bother and just use Windows AIK to help design, configure and deploy the Windows 7 images.

LS, I would like to create a (command or vbs) script that assigns Windows shortcut keys to the program links in Windows Start Menu (Ctrl+Shift+W for Word, Ctrl+Shift+D for our remote control software) so I can include this in the unattended setup of our computers. I've tried to find information on how to do this, but unfortunately I didn't find anything helpful so far. Does anyone here have experience in doing this? Many thanks in advance!

Thanks for your reply! The Proxy Settings are indeed configured in User Configuration/Windows Settings/IE Maintenance, as are the title bar text and the custom buttons. %appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\brandlog.txt is present but does mention any of the custom settings I configured. %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\brandlog.txt also is present but does not mention any of the custom settings %programfiles%\Internet Explorer\Custom is empty As far as I know, the IEAK was never used to define policies relevant to IE6. So despite of not being mentioned in the brandlogs, the homepage, custom buttons and Title bar are set and the proxy settings aren't. Gpresult show the IE7 gpo as "applied" on all the machines I've tested.

If anyone has experience with/an idea on how to fix the following, I'm all ears because I'm almost literally stuck... Our clients (450+) are running Windows XP SP2 and higher with IE7 installed. The group policy responsible for IE related stuff sets the homepage, the custom buttons and the custom title bar perfectly, but not the proxy settings. But if I roll back IE7 to IE6, everything works as it should: proxy settings are exactly the way they should be. The DC is running 2003 R2 SP2 and the gpo defining the internet and proxy settings is defined using the IE7 adm template. Disabling the "Make proxy settings per-machine" in Computer Configuration\Admin Templates\Windows Components/IE -as suggested in some related kb posts- did not help I'm this far from curling into a foetal position.... .

Our company is still standardized on Windows XP and it will be at least another year or so until we start looking into Vista. When I realized how powerful the ImageX/WinPE tool combination was, I decided I wanted to replace our current Imaging tool with these Microsoft products. Now I'm at a strange point. I do have it working (it even delivers the image quicker than our old 3rd party tool) but I don't know where to go from here. The setup is fairly simple. The ImageX capured XP sysprep images are on a fileshare and I've added an "apply.cmd" file to the the generic_x86.wim from BDD which looks like this: net use z: \\imageserver\share /user:svc.account password z: diskpart /s commands.txt copy z:\%1.wim c: imagex.exe /apply c:\%1.wim 1 c: del c:\%1/wim exit After booting from PXE, all desktop support has to do is choose the Generic Windows PE boot image. The apply command followed by the image name as an argument delivers the sysprep image perfectly. So far no problems. Now, what do I do when a desktop computer has a NIC not (yet) supported by Windows PE 2.0? Using PEIMG to inject the driver into the generic_x86.wim doesn't work because it is already "prepped". Or should I create a fully customized boot.wim that can be added to WDS? And how should I do this? The second question is about a more userfriendly interface. I know WinPe is powerful, so it should be fairly easy to create a graphical menu for my current procedure instead of the crude command file. Has someone already succeeded in creating a low maintenance menu that automatically generates items based on names in a fileshare? Many thanks in advance

Hi Martin, Unfortunately I still haven't figured out how to update the boot.wim with the new Intel 82566DM-2 drivers. You are referring to a an inf file that I cannot find in the Dell or Intel drivers. The only inf files included in the package are e1e5132.inf and e1000325.inf, and neither of them worked after adding them with the peimg command. Could you please specify how you made it work? EDIT: Never mind, I'm an id***... I keep forgetting WinPE 2 is a small version of Vista and NOT of XP... it will probably work like a charm once I have found the Vista drivers...

Our company deploys computers containing sysprep images to the end user. The only thing the user has to enter in the mini-setup is the computer name. The computer account is then already defined in a Computer OU that has software installs linked to it in the Computer part of the GPO. Now here's my question: how can I make the gpo installs work before logon? Currrently, the deployment of software works but only after the user logs in and does a "gpupdate". If we don't use a sysprep images but RIS to deploy XP, the installer gpo's do run before logon. Is there an additional argument I can put in the "sysprep.inf" to force it?

Our company deploys computers containing sysprep images to the end user. The only thing the user has to enter in the mini-setup is the computer name. The computer account is then already defined in a Computer OU that has software installs linked to it in the Computer part of the GPO. Now here's my question: how can I make the gpo installs work before logon? Currrently, the deployment of software works but only after the user logs in and does a "gpupdate". If we don't use a sysprep images but RIS to deploy XP, the installer gpo's do run before logon. Is there an additional argument I can put in the "sysprep.inf" to force it?

Our DS is currently not running DHCP, but due to server consolidation it will pretty soon. Also, our network guys have divided our corporate network into separate VLANs a year ago. Maybe this could have something to do with this current issue?

Hopefully this is the right section to post; I'm a bit lost. I have configured Windows 2003 R2 with Windows Deployment Services in mixed mode. The legacy images (RIS) work fine when booting from PXE, no problem whatsoever. Now our company is slowly looking into deploying Vista with WDS (which is designed specifically for this task) and now it gets tricky. As far as I know, the server side is setup as it should with one Window Vista PE (x86) boot image in place and one image group containing the install.wim Vista install image In DHCP options, I've only made a change in option 67 DHCP 060 PXEClient DHCP 066 10.31.2.9 DHCP 067 Boot\x86\wdsnbp.com (used to be "OSChooser\i386\bootrom.com" for RIS) After booting a workstation from the NIC, the WDS bootfile is definitely doing something but all that happens is the following: WDSNBP started using DHCP Referral. Contacting Server: 10.31.2.9 Architecture: x64 Contacting Server: 10.31.2.9 TFTP Download: boot\x64\pxeboot.com . TFTP Download: boot\x64\pxeboot.com . And the TFTP Download message repeats until I get a timeout. I don't get it, what makes the new bootfile think the client workstation has a x64 environment? Has anyone seen this before? What can I do to resolve this?

The issue I'm trying to describe only involves the very start of RIS deployment, where the NIC is the bottleneck. Although the GX745 still uses a Broadcom 57xx NIC, we cannot use the flat image that has been working for the GX280 and GX620 which also use a similar Broadcom card. The helpful link below did help us in making the latter two work, but it has not yet been updated for our specific issue. Maybe everyone has moved on to using WDS/BDD apart from us.... http://bink.nu/forums/10447/PrintPost.aspx

Has anyone succeeded in RIS installing the DELL GX745 workstations? Because I sure haven't. I was unable to find a RIS enabled inf from Broadcom to support their somewhat newer BCM57xx NIC and somehow noone else seems to be dealing with this issue. So far, I'm still stuck with the "The operating system image you selected does not contain yadayada" notification. Is there someone out there who can help me? Many thanks in advance...

Thanks! This seems to be the solution to my problem. One question though: in my current set-up, I use svcpack.inf to process kb888111. Should I use the /integrate option instead because the drivers are processed at an earlier stage than svcpack.inf?