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Using WDS to deploy Windows XP sysprep images


valkenaer

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Our company is still standardized on Windows XP and it will be at least another year or so until we start looking into Vista. When I realized how powerful the ImageX/WinPE tool combination was, I decided I wanted to replace our current Imaging tool with these Microsoft products. Now I'm at a strange point. I do have it working (it even delivers the image quicker than our old 3rd party tool) but I don't know where to go from here.

The setup is fairly simple. The ImageX capured XP sysprep images are on a fileshare and I've added an "apply.cmd" file to the the generic_x86.wim from BDD which looks like this:

net use z: \\imageserver\share /user:svc.account password

z:

diskpart /s commands.txt

copy z:\%1.wim c:

imagex.exe /apply c:\%1.wim 1 c:

del c:\%1/wim

exit

After booting from PXE, all desktop support has to do is choose the Generic Windows PE boot image. The apply command followed by the image name as an argument delivers the sysprep image perfectly. So far no problems.

Now, what do I do when a desktop computer has a NIC not (yet) supported by Windows PE 2.0? Using PEIMG to inject the driver into the generic_x86.wim doesn't work because it is already "prepped". Or should I create a fully customized boot.wim that can be added to WDS? And how should I do this?

The second question is about a more userfriendly interface. I know WinPe is powerful, so it should be fairly easy to create a graphical menu for my current procedure instead of the crude command file. Has someone already succeeded in creating a low maintenance menu that automatically generates items based on names in a fileshare?

Many thanks in advance

Edited by valkenaer
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A couple of ways to add the drivers...

The way I do it is to have a scripted PE builder, so I can just click "create" and it makes it for me with whatever drivers I want. This would allow you to add them offline and re-create PE whenever you need.

Or you could take your created image, mount the WIM, add the driver files, add Drvload to startnet and install the drivers when PE boots.

User interface, take a look on these forums for the ImageX GUI, never used it myself but it does look like a very nice tool.

And something else that will speed up your deployment, I notice you copy the WIM down to the PC before applying it. I just apply straight from the mapped drive, effectively halving the time...

I've noticed that SCCM seems to copy the WIM then apply it too so there might be a good reason for doing this, however I've never had a problem yet applying an XP image straight from a mapped drive.

Hope that helps, even a little :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

You can use peimg /inf=<path> on prep'd images. You don't have to work any magic. It works just fine.

As for user interface, my company has two that I developed. The PE batch file calls our "loader" that sets all the drive letters how I want them, discovers cdrom drives, stop services, creates a pagefile if needed and then kicks of the primary frontend. This front end has options for all of our images, has links to the basic utils like regedit and notepad and other stuff like some remote admin tools. It sets mac addresses (still use these), gets ip, finds the closest imaging server and does its bit. Has a lot of guts to it, but works great for us. We have about 15 different PC models in service right now, (Desktop, Laptop and Tablet) and they run from the same wim file that is about 1.1GB. The shell does all the HAL magic, injects drivers based on what model the PC is and also stages applications to the imaged PC to be installed after it comes out of sysprep.

It is all just a simple VB6 app, added 0 dll's to the machine to run the app, just "devcon" to better control devices since I like using it better then reinventing the wheel with win32 calls.

I think people have some basic UI's out there driven by HTA or other simple GUI's. The loader and shell we use has been in used since about a year ago and it has been an amazing tool versus the old ghost/pqi + maintaing 15+ images.

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