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Infinite Configuring Updates


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I'm trying to update the Vista OEM CD that we use at work (it's a PC repair shop) to be more up-to-date and unattended, because time isn't money there but it is a luxury none of us can afford :)

I took the Vista disc and copied it to HDD, setup the folders and attempted to slipstream IE8 using WAIK according to this site, which is the best example I could find.

Everything went fine during the slipstreaming. It was erroring out at first until I realized I needed to use attrib -r on the Offline folder, so apparently this disc is a Gold version. After I figured that out, I mounted and slipstreamed IE8 into each build, and those all completed without error, returning Exit Code 0x0.

So I fired up vLite, removed the two 'N' builds, used it to make a simple answer file and rebuilt (all), creating a new ISO.

When I use this image in a VM however, it will install correctly but when it would log in the first time, it says Configuring Updates 3 of 3, and goes into an infinite reboot cycle.

This is frustrating. I can verify the integrity of the disc I copied from, and the version of IE8 I downloaded from here.

The Vista disc is x86 and I made sure to download the 32-bit version of IE8 for Vista. I attempted re-downloading after the first VM test failed, same result.

I'm kind of scratching my head here, any suggestions?

*Edit* Forgot to mention, the disc has SP2 on it already, if that matters.

Edited by Chocobits
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If it were me, I would make a master install image... well I've done this anyways. I am pretty sure you can recreate an install DVD with this type of image, but I use WDS and WinPE for imaging Vista, so I have no experience with creating install DVDs. Here's my basic workflow (for Windows 7 and 2008 also):

1. Use DVD with unattend to install Vista to a PC and make sure autounattend puts the system in Audit mode.

2. Install updates (since you have SP2 in this already, I'll leave out the prep steps)

3. Sysprep /audit /generalize /shutdown

Capture image with imagex, make sure to use /flags option.

Then you have some choices now. If you aren't going to care what the install does, such as boot to welcome you would:

4a. boot the system back up and sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown

Capture image again, same was as above. Or if you want to unattend your install, this instead:

4b. boot the system back up. Copy unattend.xml to the HDD, run sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml

Capture image again, same as above.

What ends up happening if you have the original Audit image that will give an extra chance to recreate a deployment image. Or you can just deploy the Audit mode one and sysprep it when you are done.

Now it should be possible to take the image made in 4a and put it back into the DVD, replacing the install.wim in sources and run an unattend against it.

Well hope that helps.

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I've never used Sysprep so you're Dutch and I'm Finnish and we'll go along speaking our own languages lol :-s

I did end up resolving this particular issue. It turns out I was "doinitrong". I was using 64-bit version of imagex.exe (Silly me for assuming 64-bit would be backward compatible with 32 bit images instead of the other way around), and I didn't have the wimfilter installed.

After I installed wimfilter I was able to integrate IE8.MSU with vLite.

Also, here's a neat little trick for doing small edits/changes to a Windows build:

Using an ISO editor like PowerISO, you can open up your ISO and drag and drop let's say a new copy of unattend.xml, or even just edit it directly inside and PowerISO can re-save the image, preserving its bootable state :)

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One thing to consider - vLite is for personal use only, so if you're using it in your PC shop you're probably violating the EULA.

Plus, what you want to do can be easily replicated using other free tools with no such restrictions like MDT 2010.

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