RobMac

Well, atleast I'm not the only one trying to overcome this issue. But let me explain what is really happening. Setup **apears** to halt. It is actually still going i nthe background. I promise you, if you walk away and come back like 5 minutes later, setup will have moved on. Yes, it's anoying, yes it's dells fault, but no, it's not stopping your unattend I noticed the issue on latitude d610 's. We have a RIS server with a mess of stuff integrated, everything is unattended, office 2003, winzip, adobe, dells wlan drivers. The only issue was that hardware wizard during setup. So i checked around, ALOT of people are having the same issue. But if you were to sit and wait, without clicking next, I'm sure it would continue, all of my RIS installs take off after about 3 minutes. I have only noticed this on the latitude d610, it's never come up on the d810 once out of about a hundred or so. It appears to be when windows detects the video card, it automatically prompts for your pnp monitor driver. Eventually, if you don't supply one, it defaults to the generic one. The kicker? the generic one IS the driver! It's just a dumb little glitch that wastes about 5 minutes of your time, but rest assured, everyone I know having this issue has the same results as me. Leave that window alone, 5 minutes later it continues setup, and the monitor is installed fine. When you see that hardware wizard appear, go have a smoke, when you get back, if it's stil lthere, have another smoke, it will be gone by then P.S. if anyone finds an easy solution for this other than forcing the drivers with additional files, please let us all know!

When you create an image using RIPrep you are basically taking a snapshot of a fully installed and configured machine, much like sysprep. When doing it that way you MUST retain a "flat" image (meaning a cd based image) on the RIS server, so the client machine can access those original files. Besides that, using RIPrep requires the HAL and a few other things be IDENTICAL on all machines to be imaged. Using RISetup is more like creating a distribution folder on a server. It creates an image from the installation CDROM, and can be used across various hardware configs, because it is basically an unattented install from the CD as if it were in your drive. When you install RIS you are also installing SiS, single instance storage. This function allows the server to scan files (groveler) to find exact duplicates. Say you have 2 images, both almost the same but for a few different OEM drivers. SiS will find duplicate files, check to make sure they are the exact same file, then store only 1 copy on the server. Reducing the space needed to host your images. This comes in handy for environments where you might have 5 or more images that are similar, but with a few minor differences. Now, I may be wrong on this part, but as far as I can find, setting up more than 1 image on your RIS server is as simple as using the RIS snap-in, and selecting NEW IMAGE tab. Supposedly the CIW files will be modified to give the choice of the images, as long as the user attempting the RIS has the correct access to the SIF files for the images(read i believe is sufficient). I'm currently in the process of setting up multiple RIS images on 1 RIS server, and will post accordingly if I find it works by default, or if I'm correct in thinking that I will have to manually edit the .osc files to add the selections for the multiple OS images. RIS is about the worst microsoft product for documentation. Everything you get from microsoft is vague and not very much help past the actual install of RIS on your server.