Windows 2003 server unattended/RIS installation

[Ahmed-26]

Hello all,

Good Day,

I have recently purshased a new Dell PowerEdge 750 server and i want to install windows 2003 server remotely to this server using Microsoft RIS. I made another server for this purpose , making this server as a domain controller (a requirement for RIS) , installed DHCP and TFTPD server to prepare the new server for PXE boot and download the boot file image.

Please refer to the following steps i did in my test environment in details :

1) I prepared a master server to hold RIS , DHCP and TFTPD and this server is Dell Dimension series.

2) I ran "risetup" to create a flat base image of windows 2003 server and it performed successfully.

3) After that , i setup the DHCP scope options 043,060,066,067 for PXE booting and in the option 067 i typed the "startrom.n12" as the boot file image.

4) I setup my TFTPD server to look at the path : "Reminst\Setup\Setup\English\Images\WINDOWS\i386\templates".

5) I started my new Dell PowerEdge 750 server to perform a PXE Rom boot and i saw a client installation wizard screen. Good!! sounds great till now and this means that i am walking through the deployment process successfully.

But!!!!! After i logged in to the domain using the administrator credentials in the CIW , i didn't see any images at all and it says that " may be either i don't have a network permissions or there are no images in the RIS server" in the OS Choices screen.

I troubleshooted the problem by the following :

1) I looked in the Group Policy for RIS options and i enabled all the deployment options.

2) I checked the permissions on the image, so to make it easy enough , i gave "Everyone" and "Administrator" a full control permissions.

3) i aslo gave the same ACL permissions on the Images folder.

I really didn't know what to do , i searched all the forums on earth about this problem and finally i found out that the new Dell PowerEdge server got a different hardware abstraction layer (HAL) other than the Master Dell Dimension server .

So, the question is ... How to have an image with different HALs for deploying windows to different machines?! .

Some people say that its wise to have all your hardwares in servers to be identical and other people say that to use Sysprep. I don't want to have all my servers identical because every customer need his/her own harware specifications in servers.

In my case , i don't want to use Sysprep because i don't want to deploy an image from existing windows but i want to install windows from scratch to servers and workstations.

Please i appreciate step by step guide to how customize a HAL for different machine deployment or having a centralized image got different HALs for targeted machines.

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Ahmed

[Turge]

Sounds to me like you want to perform an unattended installation of Server 2003. RIS prepped images require the same HAL, and Sysprepped images need hardware which is similar. You could get away with it, but an unattended install would be the same as a manual install except you would provide all the answers through the answer file. It would take the same amount of time to install of course.

Let me know if you need help with this. I have worked with all 3 methods.

[ChrisBaksa]

"Sysprepped images need hardware which is similar"

Turge,

Quck note on that. This statement is incorrect. A sysprepped image can be deployed to any peice of hardware as long as you provide the drivers that are required and re-seal the image after the sysprep.inf has be properly configured.

I have one image that can be deployed to one of 32 server models I support across 4 different hardware vendors.

Chris

[getwired]

If the HAL is different, it isn't supported by Microsoft. Taking a Sysprep image of an ACPI system to a non-ACPI system won't work and isn't supported. Taking a PIC MP image to an APIC MP system won't work either. APIC UP images can go to APIC MP systems and vice versa, and PIC UP images can go to PIC MP systems and vice versa - but neither is supported to go to an ACPI or non-ACPI single-processor system.