IcemanND

I had this problem with netwrok drivers once. Found that there were leftover drivers from the image. Go into windows\system32\inf and delete oem*.inf, and oem*.pnf then sysprep and capture. Hope it helps.

look in registry at HKLM\software\microsoft\windows NT\currentversion\winlogon I seem to recall, it's been a long time, that you can changed the "Shell", "UIHost", and "Userinit" values to your own to not have explorer run and only have your own app run in their place. Do some research first, my brains a little rusty on this, but it should get you pointed in the right direction.

Why not just add the drivers to the image, or inject them after deploying and let windows do the work by having the driver folders listed in the HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\devicepath key? Then on first boot up if new devices are found it sound find them and install the drivers and other associated settings. Alot less messing around and then you don't need to try and access the registry at all if you set up a default set of folders to keep the drivers in.

he'll still need the ghost32 executable from the installer.

I'm guessing you want to capture an image of a drive from a boot cd? if so you need either the ghost.exe file or ghost32.exe depending upon if you are trying ffrom dos or a windows environment. do if they are not available directly off of the cd then you will need to either extract them from the installer or instll it to a machine and copy them from the installed program folder.

Now there's an ad at the bottom of the pages ony. None at the top or between the 1st & 2nd post. Hi GreenMachine.

Ditto, icon is back but the ads are still there.

Tell me about it. I have an upcoming meeting where I'm hoping to convince them to my point of view. But in the mean time I'm looking to see what i can do. Maybe I can make millions....of IT support people happy. ith the help here of course.

That line works fine, and if all of our boxes were MP/UP ACPI I'd be in heaven. Or if I could convince the powers to be that those are the only systems we are going to target since anything alse should be removed from service in the next year (hopefully) anyhow. But until then i have to look at all the options. Actually if it wasn't for the HAL issue I'd be set. I already have an image which I can drop to over 14 different models as long as it uses UP/MP ACPI HAL.

on a different note in regards to the HAL. If when you run BartPE/WinPE it detects the correct HAL of the system you are booting in wouldn't we be able to use the same process to install the correct HAL to the system we are imaging. Maybe just a pipe dream but I thought maybe worth a few heads banging against it. I have not had a chance to look at it yet but hopefully later I can.

@bezalel - absolutely right. I keep forgetting most new printers are usb only. After 24 years of having either parallel or network printers I never remember that.

In some of the older BIOS you could still use the Print Screen key to send the text screens directly to the printer. Some of the newer BIOS systems you still can others you can't. Otherwise I think you are out of luck. Or write em down.

The Sponsor icon on the posts are replaced with "Group Icon" text. And the ads are showing after the first post. Just started today that I noticed.

You need to be installing it after Media PLayer 10 is installed. If your not installing media player 10 then download the MP9 version.

Must be a Dell GX400, for a relatively cheap source of memory, contact your local university. A lot of them had/have gx400's and are now replacing them. And said universities usually have a surplus department which offloads the now unused computers, furniture etc. The local university to me has about 50 gx400's they are selling for $100 to $150. You could even end up with a better cd/dvd/cdrw hard drive or other componetnts this way. As far as what to do I'd go with pmshah's idea, or get a copy of DeepFreeze and then they'll have to reinstall the application everytime they need it. But when you want it gone just restart the computer.

Actaully I did not run into any problems in testing but that doesn't mean they would not have come up. And I wasn't really concerned about going all the way back to the standard HAL. I mean who in their right mind would really want to run XP on a PII 300mhz machine in the first place. From the reports I've collected it looks like 70% of the machines we are concerne about are ACPI Uni/mutiprocessor, another 20% are ACPI. The remaining 10% are standard and personally I'm not really concerned about them, but I'm still trying to convince my managers and directors of that. We have not yet purchased the UIU but the quote we had was around $10 a machine. Cheap when you consider what we are paying to build a machine from scratch or maintain over 30 images across our organization. We won't ever get down to 1 image, but we could get it down to 10 images instead of 30. Some of our images contain over 12gb of software, others are just the os and updates, but most exist because of differing hardware. And until recently when I changed jobs I did not have time to pursue this endeavor and no one else even considered it. After seeing what the UIU could do and what Acronis can do I began pursuing it further. And actually at the time this post was started I began working on an application to run at first bootup after sysprep to replace the HAL, right now it's mostly pieces and testing but it's getting there. As I'm really writing it for work I will likely only design it to target the machines we wish to target, but I have to convince managment of that first. So we'll see how it goes.

As far as the UIU, I built my test image on an ACPI system and deployed it to the Standard HAL, ACPI uni/multiprocessor HAL, ACPI without any problems. These machines ranged from a Dell GXA to the current Lenovo M52 desktop, there were a few drivers missing on the newest machines but all it took was a phone call and a days wait and they gave me an update to their driver pack. The driver issue I've had with BTS's packs also so it's not a complete solution for drivers either. I did not try going from SCSI to PATA/SATA but I did go the other way without issue. The only driver issue they could not solve was for the TPM on the thinkpad systems which was not properly signed by the manufacturer. I don't think that HAL swapping would be an issue but using beta compinents usually is.

so which fixed it for you niceguy the first or the second?

No confusion just trying to get all the details before having you try anything. Don't want to have your data permantently gone. so the more info we have the less likely we'll lose it. It's alot easier doing this in person than over the net too. Other than trying one of the many data recovery apps out there, I'm running out of ideas.

is there someplace that all of the switches for setup.exe are, I'm referring to the one which is run on first boot after sysprep is run. -newsetup -mini are the two I know of off the top of my head, are there others that might do things that would help this effort?

that's not a good sign. I'm assuming you didn't delete the partitions before taking the drive out. When it was installed in the old machine did it have a drive overlay manager installed so you could see the entire 40gb in the other machine because it was not entirely seen by the bios. Or did it have goback installed?

is there more than one partition? and how are they formattedd fat32 or ntfs

does it have a drive letter assigned? probably not. what does it say the drive status/file system/type etc. is in the disk manager? Does it say it's online or offline? Need more details.

what happens when you try to access it in Disk Management? If it's seen in the device manager it will probably ask you in the disk manager to import a foriegn disk. click yes and let it import it then it should assign it a drive letter. If you set your folders to private or change permissions on folders you will need to take ownership of the folders. You'll discover this when you get access denied messages.

to my knowledge and recollection the network is not yet available at this point of the install.