I just recently started using RIS to install operating systems in my company (OS only). I decided that it would speed things up to start installing the Operating Systems and the software all at once. I set up a PC with WinXP SP2, updated everything with windows update, set all the settings the way I needed them, and installed all of our company software. I used sysprep to create an image for use with RIS and told sysprep to put the image out on the RIS server. On some machines however, mainly older ones, I can't get that particular image to show up in the "OS Chioces menu" Base OS installs are all that show up. On newer machines I have no trouble getting the image to show up... Any ideas?

If you're RIS server is running Win2003 it may be due to the HALs being different.

MS KB Article

I guess on Win2003 the RIS application will only present images that are compatible with the hardware you're targeting, and since the flat images are not hardware specific you can see those. On Win2000 servers RIS isn't that smart.

That makes so much sense it's scary! Come to think of it the BIOS on the machines I'm trying to install the image on are being picked up by windows as (Standard PC) instead of (ACPI Uniprocessor PC) like the one I used to make the image. Thanks for the info I think you may have solved my problem...