Running imagex as a restricted user

[tes1966]

Hello... I have a Windows Server 2003 system. We have have a dozen or so users on this system. Each user is in the Users group. We are trying to get imagex to run for these users but it's not working. We are basically trying to make packages of files using imagex for use in our Windows XP and Vista images.

When a user tries to run an "imagex /capture" it starts and ends with no error messages but does nothing. When logged in a a power user or admin all is fine.

Would anyone know what to set (policy or other) on the system to get imagex to work for standard users?

[Tripredacus]

Are you using some super exclusion list? If that usergroup doesn't have file permissions for something, and ImageX attempts to copy that file first, it is possible that it would skip all the other files as well. I'm not sure but that's my first idea.

[tes1966]

Ah... I should have added that detail. Sorry. I have no exclusion list for imagex so it's incluing everything in the folder. The users have full read, write and execute permissions to the folder that contains the files that need to be included in the WIM.

For example I create a folder called "E:\Work\Office2007" and then copy the contents of the Office 2007 CD into this folder. The users have full rights to the folder. They run imagex and nothing happens... no errors... no WIM file created. Log in as as an Admin and all works fine.

We started out with imagex.exe 6.0.6000 and are now using 6.0.6001.

[Tripredacus]

Its really cool that you brought this up, I never tried using Imagex in this way. Here are my results (I am a domain admin) and of course I got no errors.

C:\Program Files\Windows OPK\Tools\PETools>imagex /capture c:\data\bios c:\apps\test.wim "BIOS" "BIOS" /compress fast

ImageX Tool for Windows
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.


Files/folders excluded from image capture by default:

 \WINDOWS\CSC
 \RECYCLER
 \$Recycle.Bin\*
 \System Volume Information
 \pagefile.sys
 \hiberfil.sys
 \$ntfs.log


Progress: 100%

Successfully imaged c:\data\bios

C:\Program Files\Windows OPK\Tools\PETools>cd c:\apps

C:\apps>dir *.wim
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is B4F4-FF22

 Directory of C:\apps

04/17/2008  03:35 PM		27,002,056 test.wim
			   1 File(s)	 27,002,056 bytes
			   0 Dir(s)  38,194,384,896 bytes free

C:\apps>

Also perhaps there are some ownership issue? I will play around with this tomorrow if you're still having a problem. I'm in the process of moving my deployment server (which is running on a domain in which I can attempt to recreate the situation) so its not even on at the moment.