Hi all, this is my first post in your forums.

I am a UNIX guy who has been asked to set up Windows 2008 WDS to install XP, 2003, 20008 and Windows 7 clients, and I have to say, I have never seen anything so confusing and badly documented in my life.

I have managed to get a basic unattended installation of Windows 7 64bit and am at the stage of now 'personalising' the installation. I thought I would start with what I thought would be an easy one:

I would like to copy a bunch of files and packages from the WDS server to each Windows 7 client hard disk. No need to install them - simply copy them to the system and I'll install them later (they are bespoke applications).

I believe there are multiple options for this - you can create a data .wim file and use this at some point to copy the packages across. However, as our packages are updated every 2 months or so, I thought it easier to use the 'older' method of a distribution share. This uses the $OEM$ folder structure, right?

So, assuming my $OEM$ folder structure is correct (seems quite straightforward) and assuming I have chosen "Select Distribution Share" in Windows SIM, then how should I update my answer file to point to the share? How does the installation know that it should grab all these files and pace them in the appropriate location?

Or, would you recommend I use a different option? (remember - this WDS server will continue to be used to roll out older Win2003 and XP clients - another reason to use the $OEM$ method?)

Thanks so far folks,

Bob

To be perfectly honest with you, you are right... The Windows AIK tools are just the plumbing pieces, and how fun it ever is to play around with unattend.xml files, dism, command lines tools, batch files and create your own scripts... that's not the proposed or recommended way by Microsoft... Thing is, Microsoft realized this was bad, and created a deployment solution to work as a layer on top of Windows AIK. The deployment solutions is free to download from Microsoft, it's named Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010... the link is www.microsoft.com/deployment

You can even initiate the deployment from unix box

Thanks for your response Johan. I'll take a look at MDT 2010 and see if this relieves my insanity somewhat :-)

Also, stay away from DataImage if your Server is 2008. It does not work (properly if at all) unless you are up to R2. If you figure out how to use DataImage (without MDT2010) on regular Server 2008, let me know.

Hi guys,

Still no luck. I can install Windows 7 unattended, using WDS. All fine (eventually!). Now, I want to simply copy 2 directories containing files and folders during the unattended installation, from the WDS server to the client. No installation of these applications required, just copy.

I have created a distribution share, and under $OEM$ Folders I have created sub folder c (meaning copy to C: drive), followed by opt and so on - so I want my files to be copied to c:\opt\... on the client.

But now that this is created, how do I tell the unattend.xml to 'go and copy those files'? Unlike Out-of-Box Drivers, there is no right click context where you can specify "Insert to pass....".

Anyone managed this?

Cheers

Edited July 16, 201016 yr by bobsapp

$OEM$

$1 <<- Drive Root

Not sure wds does same but on a dvd you just add $1 folder which is drive root. drop whatever folders there

$OEM$

$1 <<- Drive Root

Not sure wds does same but on a dvd you just add $1 folder which is drive root. drop whatever folders there

Thanks maxXPsoft, but surely this must be referenced in the unattended.xml somewhere, or?

at long last I found the answer. So, for anyone else who needs to know how to copy files and folders across, as well as run a post installation script automatically, go here

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserversetup/thread/e70bd077-cd4c-4fe7-875f-90ec5a26bee6