XP VM and Network Drivers

[jpboyce]

Hi all,

I have the following setup:

- A Windows 2008 R2 server running Hyper-V for testing purposes

- 2008 R2 Domain Controller (virtualised)

- 2003 member server running RIS

My intent has been to setup RIS to deploy Windows XP to virtual machines in a fashion that's as automated as possible. Thanks to the documentation on this site, I'm almost there. When I'm setting up the virtual XP machines, they have only the Legacy Network Adapter installed to allow PXE booting.

I've run into one problem - the virtual XP machine doesn't appear to join the domain and upon the first login, I am logging in as a local user. If I check the Computer Name tab under system properties, it lists a workgroup. In addition, the network card isn't installed properly, as if it's missing drivers.

I've tried extracting all the drivers from the Integrated Services ISO that comes with Hyper-V and adding them to my RIS deployment. I've also taken the Legacy Network Adapter drivers from a WinPE boot image. The latest attempt doing this appears to have installed some of the drivers properly, including the network card. It just seems it's not there when it's at the stage of attempting to join the domain.

All machines involved are on the same subnet, firewalls disabled, etc. Any ideas, suggestions etc? Thanks.

[cluberti]

The problem with hyper-v synthetic drivers is that they require a "core" SMBus driver to be installed and working, otherwise the other drivers may be installed but won't work (and likely the SMBus driver isn't getting finished installing until your first *real* boot into the OS). I've never been able to solve this, either, and as I've migrated away from XP I never really dug into the why either. I simply built a capture image in WDS, captured a WIM of an XP image that had been sysprep'ed after installing the Hyper-V R2 bits, and I deploy that from WDS anytime I need an XP image. I've also got a copy of the VHD after I sysprep'ed it in .vhd format, as sometimes copying that from the source to the VM server is faster than using WDS, depending on network segment (or if it's for testing on a non-network connected segment, etc).

[jpboyce]

Thanks for the reply cluberti. I had originally tried using WDS for this but found it very frustrating. In the past I'd used RIS and have more experience with it than WDS which is why I reverted to using it. I'm also kind of stuck with using XP as the operating system as the Hyper-V server I'm using is fairly limited on RAM, so I'm allocating 512MB per virtual machine. If I switched to Vista or 7, I'd probably have to bump that up to 1gig.

[cluberti]

That's not a problem, but if you have WDS, you should use it (along with MDT, if you have further needs than simple sysprep deployment) as it's much faster and more flexible than RIS. It's fairly easy to create a capture image as well once you have a Vista (or better, Windows 7) boot.wim imported.

WDS is described in pretty good detail on Technet here, but ask back in a new thread for WDS if you need help with it. I would *strongly* recommend it over RIS, even for XP.