Tripredacus

Do you have a password for your Administrator account? If you have no password, do not have a DefaultPassword key in the WinLogon section!

I wonder if any OEMs will have problems about this!

I either call it a USB Key or a USB Drive. When I got to the company I work at now, everyone called it a "Dongle" even my many failed attempts to inform them that they are not connecting them to PCMCIA Cards.

JavaScript, HTML, CSS, AutoIT, PHP, DOS Batch. I would think that ActionScript is a language?

You changed your username but the automatic logon does not recognise this. So you get this error. You can fix it by editing the registry. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Change DefaultUserName to your new username. There might be a DefaultPassword key right under it. If there isn't, make one and type your password in it. You will also get this message if you are still in Factory mode, but I doubt that is the case.

There is one program we use to create recovery partitions on some of our builds. When we install it for the first time, it creates a new partition and copies the contents of the C drive there. One of the more amusing errors it gives says something like "The target partition has too much free disk space in order to back up your data". One other time, one of our customer's had software that gave an error. In your standard error lingo, when you come down to it, it said that the error was caused by your administrator not knowing what he was doing.

We have encountered a problem with Scheduled Tasks that I cannot find a true fix for. We start with Windows XP that is custom setup, and has 1 or more scheduled tasks in it. They are set to use COMPUTERNAME\ACCOUNT and created by that same account. The account's password is typed in, and testing shows that the tasks complete properly. The we image the machine. Then we drop the image onto another machine. In what seems to be more than half the time, the password is "lost" for these tasks and we have to re-type it in the Set Password box on the Task Properties. This became such a problem (since you cannot see if the password is in there or not) that we added it to our Quality Phase, typing in those passwords, on every system just in case. The real issue is that we did not catch this issue right away, and there are at least 1500 computers already delivered into the field that may or may not have that password in there. I have already been contacted in at least one instance of the scheduled tasks failing because of this. We are able to do a work-around fix for now which will allow us to fix those particular computers, but this is a problem that we would rather didn't occur in the first place. Is this caused by a Windows behaviour that we cannot change? We have encountered other Windows behaviours (such as permissions lost on drives after formatting) that we have had to use work arounds for. Any suggestions?

OK I have completed the task of capturing the image of the C drive and the hidden partition. While capturing the hidden partition, I assigned the drive letter P: to it. As per Iceman's doc, drive letters assigned with diskpart are only for that specific Win PE session. I deployed the image today, which had to be done in 2 parts. One was the C drive, then the second for the drive I called E with DiskPart. But after rebooting into Windows, the E drive was visible and you could traverse the files. I Deleted the drive letter but this partition will not function. It does not give me the ability to boot into the recovery partition. My thought is that typically, the recovery partition appears as FAT32 (EISA Configuration). My deploy makes it appear as NTFS but with no parentheses next to Healthy. There is also a green border around the recovery partition. I am pretty sure that the problem appears during the deployment phase, concerning how imagex is putting the partition down, or how I am setting up the partition for putting the image onto. This partition should not be traversable, or get a drive letter in Windows. Any ideas?

I would be helpful if you posted the product name or model number of this "ethernet splitter". Also, just connect your laptop to the college network, and verify that you can connect to the internet. Then see what IP address you have. Then connect it to the "splitter" reboot it and see what IP address you have again. If what you bought was a hub or a switch, you will not be able to access the internet with both the laptop and the Playstation.

When the image is deployed, it needs to make it so that partition does not have a drive letter. Is that also possible? Or a fix that can be applied after imaging is complete?

I am looking to do my first capture of a multi-partition image, but I have encountered one problem. Can Imagex capture a hidden partition?

We get this if the NIC uses a different driver than is included in the PE.

Since Windows XP has something like 14 different HALs, the IMage you use needs to be machine specific. Unless your WIM is actually an install ISO, then that case is different. Windows PE, I hear, has full support for HTA scripting (also likly other tools as well). There is a Windows PE section on this forum. You can capture an image with imagex to a network drive. The computer you are using to store the boot images does not need any WDS software installed unless you are using it for PXE Booting.

I would say try to go into Safe Mode and make a new profile, the try logging in with that one to see if the same thing happens. Make sure to give this new user admin rights tho.

I am pretty sure you need to install the Windows AIK as well.

IIRC, if you do not to extensive configuration, sysprep will blow away all accounts on the machine, as well as regen your SID unless you tell it otherwise. You may also encounter drivers that need to be reinstalled after you go through the welcome screen.

I am now wondering if there is a way to create a standardised XP image that does not capture the drivers for the motherboard and HDDC for example. Because I can't use an image captured from a Shuttle onto a different motherboard, or else Windows will just reboot constantly.

I have experienced this same issue. My question is if your DS runs DHCP or not. I have this problem when the DHCP server is not the DS. If the DS runs DHCP, it all works properly and I can do a network service boot. Unfortunately in my case, the network segment will not function properly if the DS runs DHCP. So I need to figure out how to resolve this as well.

Do you get an error after you run the initializenetwork command?

Good start! I was going to say corrupted profile!

I have found instructions that allows me "To Delegate ability to authorize DHCP servers to a non-enterprise administrator" on Tech Net. The Domain Controller has its DHCP disabled (but will only use it for network service boots) and the Proxy Server is running DHCP for the LAN. The Proxy Server is not a member of the domain, so I can't ever find it to authorize it properly. Is there a way to create an alias to a non-domain computer so that I can give it security permissions? Is making the Proxy Server log into the domain the only way to do this?

This worked out very well for me. We got an order in for a machine that we could not get Ghost to recognise the drivers in DOS. So I imaged the machine using the PE. All said and done, I was able to load a 1.5GB XP Pro image on a computer in 100 seconds (it was about 1% per second). Now if I could only get it so my WDS doesn't take down the network I would be using it for everything.

I am having this proble also. On Intel 965 Chipset on a Shuttle board. The NI is a Broadcom 5789 GigaBit. I have added the driver to the PE but then an ipconfig -renew comes back with "Interface is Unknown" but an ipconfig -all does display the correct device name, but the IP address is 169.x.x.x. Also the DNS Servers are displayed ie fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1....

Bump and cross-posted

This looks really cool. I will look at it on Monday to see if we can implement it into the Deployment Server I am working on.