Windows Deployment Service - Make a Boot image that will actually do a

[JoeDe]

Spent the last several day going through MS documents, articles and discussion groups trying the get Windows Deployment Service to actually work. I have met with only partial success. I have managed to get the legacy portion to work in a blind one-shot manor. Seems limited. The next step was using the current deployment method to work. Documentation has been sufficient to capture the image and save it to a WIM file. I am unable to create a boot image that will actually install that image. Does anyone know how that's done? Anyone know or have complete documentation on this process? HELP!!!

[cluberti]

Some questions - what OS are you capturing, and what version of WinPE are you using to do the deployment? A boot.wim from a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 source has worked fine for deploying everything but XP (and that's because XP WIMs can't be bootstrapped with Vista or Win7's setup.exe, so that's expected).

[JoeDe]

Some questions - what OS are you capturing, and what version of WinPE are you using to do the deployment? A boot.wim from a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 source has worked fine for deploying everything but XP (and that's because XP WIMs can't be bootstrapped with Vista or Win7's setup.exe, so that's expected).

I am Capturing Windows XP Pro SP3 from a Dell Mini 10 NetBook. The version of Windows PE is "Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000]. The WDS server is on a Windows Server 2003 SP2.

[cluberti]

Yes, you cannot deploy a Windows XP image from a Vista or Windows 7 PE image booting from WDS, because setup.exe that it'll call from those WinPE images expect something specific in a Vista/Win7 WIM, but doesn't exist in XP. You'll have to make your own deployment PE to deploy XP, or utilise an MDT 2010 installation on that system (using the LiteTouchPE.WIM) to deploy it.

[JoeDe]

Oh...

[JoeDe]

Oh...

Any idea want version of PE wil work to deploy XP Pro?

[cluberti]

Well, any version of PE (I would suggest 3.0 from Win7/2008 R2) can deploy Windows XP, but you cannot use the Win7 or Vista PE to deploy it automatically from WDS - you'll need to create your own deployment WIM that WDS will boot to do an imagex /apply to disk of your XP image.

[JoeDe]

Well, any version of PE (I would suggest 3.0 from Win7/2008 R2) can deploy Windows XP, but you cannot use the Win7 or Vista PE to deploy it automatically from WDS - you'll need to create your own deployment WIM that WDS will boot to do an imagex /apply to disk of your XP image.

I have finished setting up a 2008 deployment server and instaled Windows OPK services, I started following the tutorial mentioned above. One of the first steps failed for what appears to be (atleast to me) an unknown reason. The commend: (Locations are taylored to my server)

dism /mount-wim /winfiles:e:\pe\iso\sources\boot.wim /index:1 /mountdir:e:\pe\mount

I should point out the correct files are actually in the locations specified. OK... dism returns with: "Error: 87 The /winfiles option is not recognized in this context". The dism log file displays 2 errors:

2010-05-20 07:51:33, Error DISM DISM WIM Provider: PID=3204 d:\w7rtm\base\ntsetup\opktools\dism\providers\wimprovider\dll\wimmanager.cpp:686 - CWimManager::InternalValidateOptions(hr:0x80070057)

2010-05-20 07:51:33, Error DISM DISM WIM Provider: PID=3204 d:\w7rtm\base\ntsetup\opktools\dism\providers\wimprovider\dll\wimmanager.cpp:513 - CWimManager::ExecuteCmdLine(hr:0x80070057)

I found a typo in the original source. The original commend in the tutorial shows "/WinFile..." the actual parpmeter should be "/WimFile...".

Moving on...

Edited May 20, 2010 by JoeDe

[cluberti]