claymen

Apologies for digging up an old thread but this is a problem that I am having. For some reason recently the RIS server stoped listing all the images. The images we are using had not been altered and were being used on machines which had previously been RIS'd without an issue. However an odd machine or two would see them which was weird. I checekd the riprep.sif files confirmed they are all ok and also tried taking a RIPREP image of a machine that couldnt see the images and tried to deploy back to it, it still couldnt see any images which makes me beleive its not a HAL issue as it should have worked back to itself. Has anyone else had the same problems and found a fix? I've not been able to dig up anything from the MS KB's that was of any help and permissions are all ok.

Both are the same HAL. I got some success by forcing the textmode portion to have the 915 sata controller driver however this fixed one machine but not the newer 915 based machines we have. I even went as far as installing a fresh XP install on the newer 915 box, taking a capture of that and deploying back and got the exact same issue. However deploying to other 865 chipset machines and its all ok.

Odly enough I am having trouble actually finding a text mode driver for this motherboard. Being it doesnt need one to install Windows it doesnt actually appear to come with one. I've also checked the Bashrat driver pack and it doesnt have the required textsetup.oem which windows xp install is asking for. Comparing the BIOS between the two doesnt appear to be much different both are in the full enhanced mode and changing that doesnt appear to do anything.

The machine that isnt accepting the image installs XP without needing the drivers at all. And BIOS updating those machines across them all here at work would be a nightmare. I cant understand how they dont work with WDS but did work with the previous RIS image, the problem being now the latest machines use a different NIC which isnt in the old RIS image plus the RIS image is very out of date in terms of windows patches. I will give it a go installing on that machine and forcing the usage of the Intel SATA driver then make an image of that.

Basically I have to reimage a large number of computers here at work due to a licensing change. Previously we have used RIS however this was before my time and honestly it looks very complicated how they managed to get it working. From what I can gather it looked like a combination of sysprep, riprep and something else. So we decided to deploy using WDS as its far far easier to capture the image and update. The image capture went without an issue, the prepatched and configured XP machine worked a treat with drivers for sound and video working perfectly. The issue that has come up however appears to be with SATA drivers on the Intel 915 based boards. When we deploy via WinPE it can see the HDD's and manages to push the data out without problems. I can boot with knoppix and read the info off the drive. However when you try and boot the machine into windows it looks like it gets to the bootloader and then instantly reboots and just continues to cycle. There is no BSOD nor is there a menu like when pushing F8 to find the error. After some stuffing about I updated the sysprep.inf to include the 915chipset SATA drivers. This was done by adding them into the Mass Storage section. Now this did work on one of the 915 boards but isnt working on the latest 915 board that we have and I cant see any reason why this would not work. It has all the latest drivers and even merged in a large number of SATA drivers from the DriverPacks but still no luck booting the machine after. This is a huge problem because rolling back to RIS would mean even more work and WDS would be much prefered with the eventual move to vista after it has stabilised enough to be enterprise friendly. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this problem booting up after deployment. Keep in mind the text mode sata drivers are there and also available in the PNP driver path (done via the registry to get around the 4096 character limit in sysprep.inf) and the image does work on other 865 chipset based sata machines and also any machine with an IDE hdd (not too many these days). At this point we can really only hold off for a few more days before we have to push a RIS image and clean it all up so any help would be greatly appreciated.