IcemanND

Ok, create one WIM image, and test it on each machine model. If it works on each one just copy it and rename it to the machine model. Add drivers as needed.

Gotta love the bosses that don't have a clue. Yes you can sysprep a machines more than once, but sometimes you will have a problem the second time if you had added and are adding again the massstorage drivers. You'll get a registry error out of sysprep. Why create separate WIM files? combine them all into one WIM with different identifier names for each. since the majority of the image is going to be the same your image is only going to grow by a few meg for each machine. That's the beautiful thing about single instance imaging, only one copy of identical files is saved in the image. I certainly would not create a individual image for every machine type. I don't care what my boss would say. He pays me to work intelligently and not waste my time and the companies money. Maybe a little sdemo would open his eyes a little. Sounds like he just has no idea at all. Add all of the drivers for every machine into your image and clean them up afterwards. The only things you have to worry about are mass storage drivers and the HAL. Mass storage drivers can be easily added. And it all depends upon the machine HAL tyepes what you have to do there.

are you tryig to add them as boot drivers? or as drivers so that the hardware is correctly seen in the device manager only?

or create a bartpe cd with virusscan on it and scan your drive before plugging it in to a running system.

When using sysprep the $oem$ folder is located in the sysprep folder, not at the root of the drive.

with any bootable cd/dvd software you have to specify a boot sector file. bootfix.bin gives you the boot screen message, and etfsboot.com is the actual default boot loader for the dvd.

Not to toot my own horn but there is a Guide here at MSFN on capturing systems using imagex. see: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...st&p=674778

Have you tried changing the signed driver policy to ignore and then install the driver? Get a newer or possibly older driver from vuescan that is signed. Install the driver into the base image for all the machines then just install the software for the machines that have the scanner attached. You could use devcon to determine if a scanner is attached by looking for the deviceid and then installing the software.

or if all the machines are the same or very similar, build one and image it to the other four.

post your script if you still have problems and we can see what else it might be.

Errr, you can't take an OS that is loaded on a machines hard drive and place it on cd or DVD. A standard OS install requires writable media when booted and running. Take a look at BartPE or Windows PE.

do they need admin rights on every machine, or just the machine they are primary user on? If the latter you could just add that user to the local administrators group. Or add the domain users group to the administrators group if they need it everywhere.

with that he should be able to query every available SQL database and come up with the answer to life. Wonder if it will still return 42.

now I have 1gb and 3gb in my laptop and desktop respectively. But started out with more that anyone would ever need in my first computer 16k.

The time zone is taken into account, the problem is you are relying on whoever setup the machine to have set it right. And heaven forbid you be in Indiana that can't make up it's mind what time zone to belong to and whether or not to observe daylight savings time.

I'm so sorry. Unfortunatley you are looking at making at least two images. Ones for ACPI, ACPI Uniprocessor, and ACPU Multiprocessor HALs. And a second for the other three non ACPI HALs. Don't figure you really have to worry about the 7th which is for som particular compaq systems.

how are you going to determine what time zone it should really be? You'll have to have some sort of logical grouping. Unless you could do it by IP address range if each site has a unique range of addresses.

actually there are 7 different HALs. Some are compatible with other some are not and some you have to fiddle a little to get them to be compatible. But how many machines are not ACPI compliant anymore that you would wan to put an image on these days?

And there is no way to change where the application looks for its data?

The registry error seems to occur when some spot in the registry for a driver does not have the default permissions. Here's how I have worked out getting around it: Open a CMD window, type: at 8:59 /interactive cmd.exe where 8:59 is 1 minute ahead of the current system time. when the new cmd window opens it will open in system context, run sysprep with your desired switched from within this second cmd window. Sysprep then completes without an issue.

I'm still working on the other guides I have planned, it is just slow going since my workload has increased recently.

The process described here has nothing to do with WDS. As I have not had but maybe 20 minutes to play with WDS and could not use RIS I can't say what you can and can't do with it.

see the unattended guide. http://unattended.msfn.org/ everything you are looking for is in there.

So Datamex - has a value in it that is "Default Outlook Profile"? which has a value that is the key {ddfc7.....} that you want to look for a certain value in the semi random value names and then delete {ddfc7.....}

Why not mount the network share as D: create your share as: \\myserver\globaldata\data Put your data in: \\myserver\globaldata\data then map D: to \\myserver\globaldata You will have to change the existing D: drive to another letter though so some users may get confused if they use D: for other things.