Tripredacus

I hate it when OEMs sell machines with nVidia chipsets and then put an ATI card in there...

No, for some reason Vista gets a pass. Probably because of the generalize option for Sysprep. I'm kinda looking forward to when XP goes away because then I'm not going to have to deal with this. Its kinda silly tho, to think that Vista is the magic fix. After working with it for so long, I realise it has some of the same problems. But I hope they don't decide to not use Vista images because it takes even longer than an XP load if doing it by hand. Fortunately my boss is on my side. He says to just keep a lid on it because he realises it is also silly but he can't really do anything about it either.

I have done the following: Changed the background pic. You can see this a couple pages back, I uploaded them. Changed some functions for the buttons at the bottom. Removed Map Network drive, capture image, append image. I changed these to launch my own applications, one that Maps 2 network drives at once, kills mshta and relaunches the HTA again. I couldn't automate the reload button. I also have it launch programs to preinstall applications for Vista and XP. I have other things I'm going to change in the future that I haven't gotten to yet: - change the prompt after imaging complete to restart instead of shut down, and also have option for Restart or install programs instead of cancel. you seemed to have given up. I need another feature which I was going to do myself. When the DISKPART menu comes up (besides the complaint that I can't use the keyboard on that screen) I need another option. I come across some systems (notebooks) that have media drives that the WinPE makes the C drive, so the script doesn't work automatically because it can't assign Disk 0 a drive letter (its already taken). So I have to manually go into diskpart and reassign vol 1 drive letter to another letter before I can format the drive to C and start the image. So.... FEATURE REQUEST: add another radio button to the Diskpart pop-up that says "use custom diskpart.txt" file. You click that, browse to the file, select it and click proceed. So that way I can have a custom text file to do diskpart if I have to do one of those notebooks. I'm in a flux right now (business stuff) with imagex so I'm not sure what my future with it will be.

0x7B means that the mass storage driver in the image is unable to initialize the hard drives that it is booting off of. Make sure that you are deploying onto the same hard drive controller and same settings like RAID or AHCI, etc.

ALT+F4 isn't needed, you could just close the CMD box which will do the same thing. The problem is if you are booted into a PE and close that box you are basically done. You can't open a new one. So you'd have to reboot if you did this. imagex.exe doesn't have a GUI. If this was done (as I have done lol) you gotta reboot and start over. The taskkill (or you can even open taskmgr) is viable but only if you open a second command prompt in order to type that in. Since you execute imagex.exe via the first command prompt, you can't type anything else in until it is finished because it won't be back at the prompt yet.

If you use DISKPART, you can specify volumes, partitions or physical disks by their number. Use the LIST command to view those values before selecting them.

The safest way to run CHKDSK is via the Recovery Console, or boot to a Win PE of some sort and run it there. I believe you use CHKDSK /R for those cases, it will repair the file system if it can. The Full Scans are more known for destroying drives.

Check out this train of thought: http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=8786

You can do this with the Devcon app. Be warned, however, that (at least I have not determined how) Devcon has problems installing multi-state drivers. In other words, say you have an "unknown device" and then you install the driver and then you have one or two more devices that appear after. I had this problem when trying to use Devcon to install 2 Port Serial cards, where it would install the driver for the first port but fail on the second. You can also look into using Drive Forge as well.

I'm stuck in a situation that I thought got resolved but it really hasn't. I just haven't heard anything about it in a while. What it comes down to is fighting against the ideas and lessons of the past, and that decisions were made at some point, accepted and never revisited. And say it turns out there is a better way, how hard should someone fight to be heard about them? Sometime in the past at my company, they used images for computers. Then things started going wrong and it was decided to not use images anymore. I came into this job during this "no images" period, and also from another company (or so say a much larger and successful company) that did use images and they knew how to use them properly. So when I got hired, the software people are still running around with floppy disks and CDs! They do use Ghost but only for temporary purposes. I see this as an opportunity to make everything more efficient. I write software to eliminate the use of the floppy disks (BIOS updates and Ghost, etc) and start making drive images. Everything goes fine until a customer complains. So it comes back to how we're not supposed to be using images for X reasons. So we stop using images and of course production time increases dramatically. I start to rethink the process and research why we aren't using images. The reasons were HALs and memory timings. I researched many things including Imagex. I could not, however, find ANY issue with using images and memory timings so I threw out that idea. Then my company says "we need to start using Imagex". So I get the server up and running, building our custom Win PE for the network boot and start making images. Except I am taking into account the HAL issue so that won't crop up again. I am also not just making an image and letting it rot up there, which was probably the reason they had problems before. I keep track of everything and if there is an issue that arises during our hardware eval process, or at any other time, I correct the image and replace the bad one. Image maintenance yes? So we had a problem with a driver on a new board, but it got out before we caught it. So the guy who does the evals, and the XP unattended fixes the installer so this won't happen. I find out about it, and fix the image for it and everything is going fine again. Then he finds out we are using images (again) and goes to complain about it. So now we can't use images anymore. It doesn't matter if everything is maintained and checked and updated. And all the work that my company had me go through to implement Imagex, its come down to us not wanting to use it now? What did they think Imagex was? It uses images! So I'm in a situation where we are going backwards again. And I had gotten some systems down to a total deployment time of 10-20 minutes. Now those same systems are up to a 2+ hours to deploy completely. How is it going to look when suddenly I can't handle the work load anymore? I really want to talk to someone about this but I'm up against a guy who's been here for years, and doesn't ever try to work with me on this issue. Its just "this is how it is" and brings no proof or research. It's down to his word against my word + research and proof of my concepts. Its not enough and I'm not sure how to handle the situation.

Forunately the one the other day was just an internal audit. I got everything right except for what was in that binder. You are right about that tho, what it says for my job is pretty basic. It was so basic I couldn't think of it. I figured it would be more in depth.

Its also the architecture detection of the WDSNBP detects most things as 64bit because its seeing the CPU. Very few 32bit CPUs nowadays, so WDS always tries to boot the x64 option. I just hardcoded the 32bit bootpath into the 64bit field to handle that situation.

That's what Microsoft is thinking right now. We're going to send them a demo unit so they can debug the process. I'm not really in the mood to put in a code change like the loop just for these 3 boards.

I'm pretty sure you can Ctrl+C it... You'll lose your partially created WIM tho after you close it.

I'd like to try it out I suppose. I've made so many changes to the current version that it wouldn't be worth it to update to the newer version. Hope you don't mind I've been kinda advertising this thread in my sig. I did it more so I would be able to find it if I needed it.

One old post deserves another. While it is probably in driver packs, Google finds it also. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=p35+158...;fp=3WTwdsC3GPc

We got our first copy of Symantec Norton Antivirus 2009 1-Year OEM CTO SYSTEM BUILDER EDITION in and there are some issues I have with it. Unlike previous versions it requires a CD Key on install. It still has its 15 day warning on the package, but I can't figure out how to install it. The older (2008 and so) did not ask for a key and would install and (I guess) just work for 15 days. Anyone try this one yet? I figure I'd ask here while I am waiting to get our support contact's info.

Are you not using WSIM to make your XP install? I'm guessing that you are doing a network boot to the bootmgr off the server and want the XP image to appear there is that correct? Or does it and it is not installing? There is a thread about using WinPE to install XP unattended, so you may be able to boot into that first. http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=88270

If you hard code this option for 2 CD Drives having the same volume ID, you am going on the presumtion that this will work on every system. There may be times when the Hard Drive is not formatted yet and that is going to throw off your numbering. Also some machines see Memory Slots or Card Readers as being volumes even if there is nothing inserted. The MSI MS-163K does this and it screwed up my scripts as well. You may be able to have a script that detects the number of CD Drives, and runs diskpart_script1 if one drive and diskpart_script2 if two drives. AutoIT has a function called DriveGetDrive. Here is an example: $var = DriveGetDrive( "cdrom" ) If $var[0] = 2 Then Run( @ComSpec & " /c x:\windows\system32\diskpart.exe diskpart_script2.txt" ) ElseIf $var[0] = 1 Then Run( @ComSpec & " /c x:\windows\system32\diskpart.exe diskpart_script1.txt" ) EndIf This is an example, and i wrote this up real quick so I didn't test it. As the help file says, "The zeroth array element contains the number of drives".

I have used HFSLIP before. Maybe it will help you too. http://hfslip.org/ I also was able to put SP3 into a recovery CD with this!

They may require that Windows be activated first. We have some like that, like IE updates will refuse to install if the computer isn't activated.

The speed issue on the 2003 was fixed by manually setting the NIC speed in Device Manager. Even at this point, the 2003 WDS runs slightly faster than the 2008 WDS, but it isn't used enough to bother with it much anymore. Its more of a test bed for me now.

Now that you mention it... IIRC, the serial number was relevant to the date of manufacture, if that helps at all. You could read that date, and the other numbers or letters could be decoded to determine if it was a retail, oem or refurb unit, also which plant it was made in and what country, or what country it was made to be sold in. This knowledge is only of the printed serial number, however. But like I said, repairs/reman/refurb units could have different hardware inside that wouldn't always match the serial number on the casing. Like if it was a bad casing and didn't replace the internals.

Well today I was informed that I will be one of two auditees for my company when ISO recertification comes around again. Has anyone been in this position? Should I be worried about it?

I hate that you can do this. I found out about this ability when researching Conflicker.