Scrapple

Hi guys, Thanx for your PM's. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to answer them or even to participate on this thread lately and it will take some time before I will. BTW Deploying Vista is gonna be so different and much more convenient. You can add modules/settings to an imagefile (.WIM) with an MMC. Check out the BDD-2007 on connect.

The UIU can handle multiple HALs, and will also handle going from IDE to SCSI, PATA/SATA. The UIU is also capable of being run on a SCSI machine and deploying to IDE, PATA/SATA. The UIU has been capable of doing this since May 2005, and the documentation for the UIU has stated this since May 2005. We have a new version that has been released July 2006 that provides a nicer interface, a more compressed driver library, and several new options. The person who claims that our documentation states that you need two images is referring to machines that have the "Standard PC" HAL. These machines stopped being produced around 1999. If you still have these machines running in your environment and you have a great need to deploy these machines to the rest of your working environment I wish you good luck. Most users have migrated off of machines this old about 3 or 4 years ago. This was more of an issue when the UIU was originally released in early 2004 because there were still some a minority of users using this archaic hardware. I work with supporting and development of the UIU. Hi, First of all, welcome to the thread... nice to actually meet a person that makes a living of a "universal" imaging program. And although your method is very different from what we're trying to create here, your input/thoughts will be very appreciated. Especially since you're a developer that I suppose knows a lot about this very subject. Now as a reaction to your defense... let me quote your documentation that came with your UIU 3.0 from july 2006: ----------------------- 2) Problem: Blue Screen or Continual Rebooting: Possible Cause: The Master PC was an ACPI compliant PC, but the PC receiving the UIU image is an older, non-ACPI compliant (Standard) machine or vise versa. Possible Cause: Deploying to or from a RAID based system. The UIU is not currently designed to work with any RAID based systems – IDE, SATA, or SCSI. Possible Cause: Deploying from a SCSI system to an IDE, PATA, or SATA system. The UIU image can go from IDE/PATA/SATA to SCSI only, and only with Windows XP. Possible Cause: Missing or incorrect main board drivers. Check for UIU Updates, or contact technical support. ----------------------- So...maybe you need to update your documentation... or tell me what I've said/read wrong... I dunno... Also, I might add that standard pc hal is not the only non-acpi hal... there are 2 more for XP and 3 more for win2k. And yeah, it sucks that there are still quite a number of companies / IT departments that have to support these old hardware (HALs). But still...they can't be overlooked. UIU is a nice program, but not really my thing, because it has some definate flaws that I've already pointed out at the beginning of the thread. What do you think about the method in this thread? Could you point out its flaws or tell me anything new that might be nice to know about universal imaging? Question for you... How do you feel about the up and coming Vista Deployment method and their tools to build and edit images? Is it worrying to your current business? Thanx a bunch!

Hi Prozac, Unfortunately this won't work, because the -very- undocumented, but really interesting functions within setupapi can't stray from their -probably- hardcoded reg-roots like HKLM\System\CCS\CriticalDevDB and the services section. I've looked into this idea myself... but I'm not a programmer and I don't work for MS, so my knowledge about setupapi is really limited. BUT... I have some good news concerning MSD injection. Let me tell you what I tried: I had some old image that did not include drivers for a Promise Fasttrak Sata Raid Controller. So I deployed that image from BartPE to such a Raid system, which of course gave me a 00007B bluescreen on first boot. Downloaded MSD to see what files (easy) and reg entries (difficult) were neccessary to inject. injected the cat, dll, inf and sys into the offline image and loaded the offline system-reg to a temp hive of BartPE. injected the most basic CriticalDev and Service key I could create... So no extra reg-parameters for the driver at all! Unloaded the temp-hive, shutdown Bartpe and tried to boot from the Harddisk again expecting it to fail miserably again with a 7B... ..... That did not happen.... It booted correctly... to my surprise! After my bootup I updated the driver like you would do normally (this can be scripted BTW) and restarted the machine... Booted fine again and there they were in the registry... all the parameters that I would've wanted to install directly from the inf within BartPE, but too difficult for me to write a generic parser for. So what could this mean? It could mean we only have to inject -very- basic entries in the Services and CritDevDB for the image to boot up without real hassle. On first boot when PNP-install should be run we could (re)-install the MSD as a PNP device and after the second boot it will run like it should be, because the correct "difficult" entries would have been installed. Of course I don't have 100's of different MSD devices laying around to test every driver on... but you guys might be able to help me with that. Testing the routine I mean... Anyway, it gives me some hope that this MSD injecting could very well be simpler than I would've thought a few weeks ago. And yeah, it would probably also work by using the MSD drivers that BartPE uses from the CD. But we should (re-)install the -full- driver on first boot properly... CU guys

If I understand you correctly you want to get the manufacturer's model-string from WMI and that would then serve as a pointer to a list of drivers... Well, the problem with this idea is that the model-string will not garantee what HAL and or drivers the deployed machine will need, because at least in our environment we have a number of pc's with the same model-string but house quite different hardware. I'd rather get a list of hardware in the deployed-machine by using a utility like pci32.exe of devcon.

You're a g-**** genius Forrest...

Hi Jim, I've seen your method before...and it ain't worth 30 bucks. In fact, it is pretty useless and old-fashioned. There's no auto HAL detection whatsoever. It just copies over the HAL files for the computermodel that the user needs to add (before sealing) to a choise.com menu within a batch-script that in its turn is run from sysprep's cmdlines.txt (after setup but before logon). Besides that, you show people how to add driver paths to the end of the oempnpdriverpath setting in your template sysprep.ini. (how hi-tech....) It doesn't work with out-of-box MSD's unless specifically added to sysprep.inf msd's section beforehand. It doesn't work from an acpi-image to a non-acpi. It doesn't work from an intel master xpsp2 image deployed to most amd's. It doesn't detect anything automatically, apart from the pnp-routines installed by sysprep itself. There is no reg cleanup for the HAL entries after you swap the HAL. Etc...etc... So... go spam appdeploy.com's messageboard, like you religiously do normally. Your little script has nothing to do with this thread. You just want people to pay you 30 bucks for a thing they don't need. Tip for you: Create a few scripts that use ideas from this thread and start selling that.

http://rapidshare.de/files/28543938/bootfiles.rar.html Only use this if you know what you're doing! I suggest you use them in a virtual pc or test machine... and read my post about dtecthal.inf carefully.

...Jup, I looked at this BartPE method, but I don't think we should use it for 2 reasons: * There's no such thing in BartPE as a CriticalDeviceDatabase key in its registry. So we would have to parse the file X:\i386\txtsetup.sif for its [HardwareIdsDatabase] section... not too difficult, but what worries me though, is the PE services regentries for these drivers. These are more basic than the entries in the registry once the MSD has been installed the "correct" way. * Another thing is the device files (.sys) for different drivers have the same name in BartPE. To put it better: i.e. there are many different nvatabus.sys files, but only one is installed in x:\i368\system32\drivers of the last UBCD4Win v3.0, so I'm wondering what would happen if that was not exactly the one you would need for your system... I guess it would load because of compatibility, but I'd rather have the most perfect (and current) driver. On the other hand, it's a real b*tch to write a great generic .inf parser to create the best reg-entries to merge. That would take ages to code (at least if I were to write it)... What do you guys think?

I'm not sure how a reg2inf would help us in this... you'd need a .reg file to create an .inf file... which is exactly the opposite I'm trying to do. But hey, maybe I'm just missing your point/idea... Could you elaborate? Usually every MSD comes with an .inf, so I would want to create a .reg file from that which contains keys to be merged with the Services and CriticalDevicesDatabase section of the loaded HKLM hive of the offline registry. An inf2reg would be nice if would work for all those special MSD syntax stuff... I'd need to check a util like this. Now, I've got another idea..., which is: to let BartPE do all the work... :-) Let me get back on that soon to see if it will work. BTW, It's freakin' hot here in Holland for quite a while (over 30 degrees celcius), so I can't think straight right now.

Hi, yes, this is exactly what we're trying to create. Just read the whole thread, and you'll know what this is all about. ...and well... I'd keep your hat on for a while, because we're just getting started here... :-) I'm not even sure if the SysWrap-plugin will ever be finished... It's a hobby project (like most stuff on MSFN) that most probably will never have the support Acronis or Symantec is able to give you.

the .inf file format... http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default....72ebb16.xml.asp pretty extensive, but we'd only have to know what sections/syntax MSD infs contain. I've searched the web thoroughly, but I can't find the generic routine or secription of the systemcall to install a CriticalDevice. So I guess we'll have to compare existing .reg and their corresponding .inf to find out just how to do it. I think if we really wanted to know the internals of this, we'd have to work on a certain team at MS. Which I don't :-) Well... maybe the WDK can help us. It has SCSi miniport driver examples and driver tools like GenInf and the sourcecode for DevCon. Anybody here with experience with those or are we all just sys-admin and deploy geeks? @Nivlacckw About the PNP reporting to run special programs... Sure, it's possible to build all kinds of control features, but I think we should first start with the most important stuff: HAL and MSD injection.

It should be exactly the same... see the UltimateP2V tools, except you should swap the vm-scsi driver for the MSD driver (.sys + .inf (+ .cat + dll if provided)) you're trying to inject. More difficult are the .reg files you should also adapt them! Use UBCD4Win's NIC/MSD driverpack so BartPE can access your SCSI harddisk.

When BartPE boots, it detects the correct HAL and puts entries in it's (temporary) registry, just like setup does in an unattended installation. When Windows is already installed on a harddisk and you boot from it, it will not detect the HAL because it has already be installed by the installation process. So unlike PE it will not display the "should've been installed"-HAL in the HardwareID reg-entry. I know of no way (other then longhorns NTLDR) to detect/install the HAL BEFORE the same OS boots from it. That code resides somewhere. "-minint" probably invokes it in PE. Now, it is certainly possible to change the HAL from within a normal windows, but you couldn't have boot from it with an incompatible HAL in the first place... That's why the HAL in the image you're about to boot from should be compatible or better: the correct HAL. Since we're doing it from PE we can do pretty much anything with the layed down image, wheter it needs an ACPI or a non-ACPI hal. UIU does it as follows: It will install the "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface" HAL for your image to ACPI systems, because that is the most compatible HAL for ACPI. On boot it will detect by a UIU routine (probably by a table with knows models and their corresponding HALs) what ACPI suits even better (UP or MP(and HT)). If you also have non-acpi systems UIU wants you to make another image where it installs the "Standard" HAL before you capture it. Such an image will normally install on ANY system, but you'll not have ACPI functionality afterwards. The best thing to test all this, is to download Virtual PC (it's free now!) and deploy and (try to) boot std-acpi and non-acpi images to a virtual machine. Then do the same AFTER you've turned acpi off in the bios of the virtual pc. Also, boot a BartPE ISO in both bios acpi modes and check the HAL registry-entry. Then you can see what I mean. Here a nice link about detecting/swapping HALs on another forum: http://www.myitforum.com/forums/HAL_detect...m_135745/tm.htm

Detecting/Swapping HALs is much easier than injecting those **** bootup-MSD drivers!!! As you might know, a MSD for your boot device is (like the textmode drivers in unattended) a rare breed of driver, because is has to be loaded early in the boot process to be able to even boot your os that's sitting on it any further. That's why certain "extra" entries must exist in the registry besides the services section (in which pointers to every uses driver/service resides). This branch is called the "CriticalDeviceDatabase" and consists basically of pnp-ids for devices the OS should try to loadup very early in the bootup. Every such entry has a pointer to their respective service. When you sysprep with the massstorage-section in the sysprep.inf it will take quite a long time for sysprep to finish up and shutdown. What it's doing all that time is parsing all MSD drivers that windows knows from it's own driver.cab and adding sections to the registry. Here's an example to make your image work on any pretty much any IDE device http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082/ the same goes (but different drivers) for the reg files and scripts in some of the tools of Ultimate P2V on: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174 As it is possible from within BARTPE to copy a few driver-files and merge a pre-formed .reg in the loaded system hive of the offline image, we are able to inject a MSD driver that loads up directly on boot. Now, I'm looking for a generic-tool that generates the .reg files from the .inf of the detected driver, because pre-building all those .reg entries sucks. Sorry, maybe I'm still to technical, but it's as clear as I can get on this stuff... maybe someone can help me to put this into better words as my English is pretty bad.

I'd actually prefer to put the drivers on a distribution-share from which you're able to build both the master-pc unattendedly and the PE ISO. That way the ISO only has to include the NIC/MSD (to be able to connect to the net-share and to be able to change stuff on the harddrive after deployment). The rest of the drivers and even the "SysWrap"-script could reside on the net-share. It's then also easy to update the pnp-drivers and even the script. A script could be controlled by a GUI and/or .ini file and therefore could also be able to turn on/off some of the features provided like: -Install detected HAL -Disable stale drivers/services (old stuff from the master-pc, you don't want to be loaded on the deploy pc) -Inject to load upon boot the detected MSD (IDE/SCSI/SATA/RAID/FiberCh/USB-Stor) -Inject to load upon boot the detected HID (Keyb/Mouse, so on first-boot other features could be turned on/off) -Inject detected PNP to (CHIP/CPU/Video/Audio/NIC/MSD/HID/TV/etc...) -Inject Mini-setup call (a sort of post-sysprep! Sysprep.inf (updatable on server!) and setupcl.exe (for a new sid)) -Inject startup scripts (i.e. WPI with a custom software folder) @Nivlacckw, judging from your sig (OPK techie) you probably know MS's msdinst.exe (or the newer: drvload.exe). How good are they? Because the most difficult routine would be to write our own generic MSD injector, instead of having to create all the .reg files (to update the offline registry with proper CriticalDeviceDatabase and Services sections). Most free P2V tools do it by this less-than-optimal .reg mergin. Probably because there isn't a free tool like msdinst.exe, which can be fed an .inf file of an MSD.

I knew about the various HAL's being used to create hal.dll, but I never thought they did the same thing for the kernel. Are there any references, that you know of off the top of your head, for which one is used in a particular instance? So we'd have to include placing the correct kernel as well as the HAL? Doesn't seem like a major deal, unless there are other supporting files that follow the same concept. Thanks for the tip. I think the premise of making this switch via a script, or coded utility, is possible. Granted MS won't touch it, but I never bother with that avenue anyway cause it usually takes way too long to get a resolution. I think I have enough to get started, now I just need to find the bandwidth. Check your C:\windows\inf\hal.inf file for which is which and what names they should get to "activate" them... :-) Good luck with scripting it and keep us posted. I might be able to advise you, even though I'm not a coder. If you can code really well you shoud also check wimgapi.dll of the new BDD2007 WAIK... the help file is included for those function calls... so you could write your own imagex.exe or GUI it with a nice progress bar like Vista's setup.exe on the DVD does.

Sure, it's possible to check the "Install Standard HAL" checkbox in UIU before you capture the image. It will install perfectly on most any system, but with very limited Advanced Power Capabilities on ACPI machines afterwards and lower performance for Hyperthreading machines. But... I have the feeling you're gonna tell me you deployed a real ACPI image to a non-acpi machine and suffer no APC disadvantages. :-) If you succeeded in doing that... that's really "wonderful?" and pretty rare scenario... but it's really not something UIU anticipated on or even supports, let alone MS. Because HAL/Kernel wise it would be the most undesirable situation you could boot a pc under... HAL-wise, that is. It will drastically affect the way some drivers communicate with the hardware. I would be very surprised if it would even run stable. I very much agree on the BTS packs... they are not the be-all-end-all solution. It needs updating and sometimes tuning too... but you can do it yourself...offline... so you don't need to include/update them IN the image, which is a big plus. Yes, PATA->SCSI works flawless with UIU. They state/support that. I wouldn't expect any different. About the thinkpad:Exotic unsigned drivers (usually laptops) will always be a pain in the a**... I've had my experiences...:-) I wouldn't use the longhorn NTLDR in a heavy production environment too... but it works and is a pretty novell way of doing HAL detection/installation, so that's why I shared it with you deploy geeks... :-) How much do you pay for the UIU license per seat if I may ask? I thought it was something like $19 dollars or $10 bucks high-bulk. For some that is cheap... other might find it very expensive... the same goes for Acronis and Symatec's solutions. A tip: You could also write a tool like UIU yourself... check ta.exe (from XP Embedded) for hal detection and rundll32 or devcon for hal installation. And sysprep with -noreboot switch to change the HKLM\system\setup\cmdline reg-entry to your own hal-routine after sysprep has run.

Well factory and audit mode exist, of which factory can process winbom.ini (like winpe), but even if some secret setup.exe parameter existed... it wouldn't be of great use for switching hals, because XP has to be almost completely boot up, before it kicks setup.exe. If you had captured an image with a hal that was incompatible with the deployed system... it would've never even made it that far into the boot-process and would just reboot/blue screen before it could detect the HAL... and THAT is exactly why UIU has a big limitation and detecting/swapping the HAL with WinPE/BartPE is the way to go. BTW, msoobe.exe is usually the program that's run with the cmdline reg-entry on a new system... most OEMs use it to enter the WinOOBE mode many of you are familiar with.

About UIU: You really give it too much credit. Granted, they do a fine job on most systems... possibly all pc's in your company, but they will NOT detect just any Hal (or have just any driver issue resolved for just any system, which I know you haven't stated) If you read the documentation of UIU (even that of march/april) you can read under the topic troubleshooting that when you've captured an ACPI image and deploy it to an non-acpi system, it will crash on boot. So you would still need 2 images with UIU, like I said before. UIU is therefore not really "universal", which they like to claim. Other things they admit they cannot do is: - deploy to RAID - capture from SCSI and deploy to IDE, Pata/Sata They also have missing/incorrect mainboard drivers sometimes, which crashes the deploy pc. And driver bangs (missing drivers) for bleeding edge hardware is also an issue. About the longhorn NTLDR: You could use it only once and swap back the XP one on second boot once the HAL is properly detected and installed. If even that is out of the question, then use the method of WinPE reg HAL detect/swapped described in my long post. If you're not allowed to HAL swap at work (because it DOES break MS support!), then be prepared to make and manage multiple images... and also throw the word "universal" out the window, because it is simply not applicable anymore. indeed, the "/detecthal" switch only works on Longhorn beta 1 NTLDR. XP's NTLDR is unaware of it. What do you mean extract all kernels? I thought there was only one so could you be more specific? And I take it the Longhorn Beta 2 that's out there now won't cut it, right? This is really an interesting topic for me. I know there are several commercial solutions out there, but I can't see paying the money for something that can be done just as easily w/a script or utility. Plus, I'm always intrigued by finding out how it works under the hood. well, I mean kernels like: ntkrnlmp.exe, ntkrnlpa.exe, ntkrnlup.exe and ntkrpamp.exe Yes, sadly Vista Beta 2 is of no use for us in this HAL swap thing.

I would like to see that. If you'd be so kind. Thanks. Ok, here's how you do it: Get the longhorn beta 1 "NTLDR" file and put it in the root of your xp image add an option to the line in boot.ini, like: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /detecthal then create a file named dtecthal.inf in C:\windows\inf that consists of the following [Version] signature="$Windows NT$" DriverVer=07/01/2001 [hal] MPS_MP = halmps.dll MPS_UP = halapic.dll E_ISA_UP = halstnd.dll ACPIPIC_UP = halacpi.dll ACPIAPIC_UP = halaacpi.dll ACPIAPIC_MP = halmacpi.dll [ACPIOptions] ACPIEnable = 2 ACPIBiosDate = 01,01,1999 extract all HALs to system32 and rename them to the filenames above. extract all kernels to system32 folder Basically what MS did is incorporate the HAL detection of the text-mode (unattended XP) in the NT loader of Longhorn. That was still the time in which they had the many kind of HALs we know from XP. The vista Beta's do NOT use/need this method, because the bootloader is different and they have only 1 universal HAL file (which BTW can't be used in XP...) Hope anyone finds this useful.

of course we're not argueing. It's a highly interesting subject to me. So I'd like to exchange a lot of info to find the most perfect way to do imaging. And yeah, I definately agree that finding and learning all this stuff on the net is very time-consuming and goes pretty deep into the system sometimes. I'm gonna look into the new version of UIU as soon as I have the time to research it. What version is it? The last version I looked into is that of june 06. I hope they have a better one now. My driver-folder on the share is over a GB extracted and contains BTS driverpacks + extra diverpacks like HID, TV, modem, monitor etc... I'm very curious if the new UIU can top that... About a Fat32 image... I know with ghost explorer i could edit that, but I'm using ImageX which isn't a sector based image, but file based, so it even allows you to keep the previous data and/or OS on the partition/disk after you deploy the new image. It also includes a filter, so you can mount and edit the image file (even script it!) It's kinda like a command line winrar.

you looked under the wrong key... so don't forget the sub-branch "Root" in the key I mentioned: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\ACPI_HAL\0000\HardwareID or for non-acpi HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\PCI_HAL\0000\HardwareID I think it is the same for WinPE, but it's definately ok in BartPE. BTW I know another extremely novel way to detect the HAL... To let windows detect it itself on first boot... just like unattended does it in text-mode. If you guys are interested in this kind of stuff I'll share it with you.

This UIU tool is too "old-fashioned" and too expensive... you have to run their tool (that runs sysprep) and after that recapture everytime a new driver is needed. Your image file swells due to their driverpack (which is also pretty limited compared to the BTS packs). It does not support RAID. You have to make two images if some of your computers are not ACPI capable. I've pretty much reverse engineered their method and it's not that difficult to make either. The beauty of the "new method" that is describe above, is that: - it's possible to use ANY (old) XP image you (once) captured - do not depend upon sysprep to be run beforehand - it can inject only the needed drivers, you don't have to put them in the image - you can also update your boot/pnp-drivers without recapturing on a net-share - can update HAL/kernel for ACPI <-> NON-ACPI (1 image is possible) - it does not depend on a certain image product (granted: UIU isn't either)

Thanx, but I've done and mentioned this same method before on this forum and these days it's not the best way. The Universal Imaging Utility also still uses this old way... A modern/better way is to adapt ANY image (prepped or not) from a Preinstallation environment. Like: - Acronis Universal Restore - Symantec Restore Anywhere That way you can keep/update drivers outside the image and not worry about HAL's or MassStorage at all. Try to boot from a "mysysprepped" ACPI image on a NON-ACPI computer.... it won't work. UIU has the same problem.

This method is definately the best way to universal imaging as far as I can see. How nice it is to: Just deploy any XP image (sysprepped or not, drivers or not) to any (virtual/real) machine and change some files/registry on the harddisk with a universal tool before you boot from it. BTW, there are already 2 commercial tools doing this: -Symantec Restore Anywhere -Acronis Universal Restore Their disadvantage is that they only handle massstorage and HAL, but don't handle pnpdrivers and they're add-ons to the company's own image-product. (Ghost, True Image) BUT: You can also write such a tool yourself. It's not rocket science... detect the HAL from the following key in BartPE: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\ACPI_HAL\0000\HardwareID and if that does not exist HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\PCI_HAL\0000\HardwareID If the HAL in the offline image is different from the one detected, then extract the right latest HAL + kernel on the offline image (usually SP2.CAB) and rename them to their proper names in C:\Windows\system32 load the C:\Windows\system32\config\system to a temp hive empty the "Enum" branch in the loaded hive so it will be filled properly at boot. detect the Processor vendor from BartPE with: HKLM\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System\CentralProcessor\0\VendorIdentifier ... if AMD then change the Startvalue of the intelppm service to 4 in the loaded hive, otherwise most AMD's will bluescreen. So... that's pretty much the HAL detection/changing routine That HAL script you mention in your link does not work when run from BartPE/WinPE, because it does't handle the registry in the offline image... it's also not always right on the HAL to be installed. Now for the Mass Storage drivers it's more difficult. But basically comes down to: Detect the PNP-ID of the boot-device, find the correct .inf file on a driver distribution share mounted from BartPE and install the .sys, .cat files in the offline image. AND very important to import the proper entries in the CiriticalDeviceDatabase and Services section of the loaded hive so the pc will not get a bluescreen (7B error). To do this is too much to explain here in detail. PNP-drivers is easy: detect the PNP-IDS of the hardware (also within BartPE) and find their corresponding .inf files (and .dll, .cat, .sys...etc...) in the extracted BTS driverpacks on a distribution share and throw them in the offile image in a folder i.e. C:\drivers. If mini-setup or OOBE is set to run because sysprep was the last action taken before capturing the image (See certain: HKLM\System\Setup values) then, Save the HKLM\System\Setup\Cmdline string value of the to i.e. C:\setup.cmd. Change the value to "C:\mysetup.cmd" copy over setupcopyoeminf.exe to C:\ Copy over/or create the C:\mysetup.cmd with the following lines: C:\setupcopyoeminf C:\drivers call C:\setup.cmd del C:\*setup.cmd del C:\setupcopyoeminf.exe If sysprep was not used, then mysetup.cmd should be set to run from a runonce entry where also devcon.exe is being injected and a "devcon rescan" is being run from within mysetup.cmd So...I'm probably forgetting some stuff, but that's basically it. A universal XP (image) changer. Let's make this a BartPE plugin called: "SysWrap" :-) But hey, besides the obvious sys-admins/deployers, it could also be used for people changing motherboards/computer and wanting to keep their installation, and what about P2V, V2P, P2P, V2V. For an imaging product I definately would use Vista's WAIK "ImageX" or script it's API "WIMGAPI.DLL"