Sysprep, Unattended Installs and HALs

[pcombs]

Hello!

I'm new to the forums and your site. I've read your docs about unattended installs, as I'm looking for a more efficient way to image my machines. Some of the info appears to be what I'd read when I first started using Sysprep. However, I'm not sure that the unattended installation info and methods you describe will solve my problem, so let me explain what I need and perhaps someone can clarify things for me...

I have four different flavors of Pentium 4 machines, all Intel mobos but with different HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers). Exactly what that involves I don't know, except that a Ghost image created on one machine blows up when it's loaded on one of the others. Rather than updating four separate images, I'd like one "Universal XP Installation Image" that is created on a master machine, with all my settings/installed software intact. I would create my Ghost image after using Sysprep and, after the image is blown down to one of the other PCs, Windows would find and load the proper hardware drivers for that motherboard as it put its face back on.

I'd read on another forum sometime last year that one enterprising person had managed to do that using brute force. He'd gone into the registry on his master machine and deleted all the hardware-specific entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE before imaging his machine. He'd also put mobo drivers into an $OEM$ directory he'd created and Windows was able to sort things out. Unfortunately I cannot find the posting (and the user wasn't too keen on writing up detailed information on what he'd done, anyway).

So, obviously this is possible. Has anyone else done this, and, if so, could you share some tips?

[cluberti]

I've since moved on from using Sysprep and use RIS entirely, but I used to do this exact same thing by replacing the HAL.DLL file before Sysprep ran after imaging the machine.

I used a small 7MB partition as the C: drive (FAT), with Windows installed on the D: partition (4GB FAT32) that was sysprepped. The C: partition included ALL of the hal.dll drivers, and when this partition was booted, a boot menu would provide the admin the ability to choose the machine that the image was being applied to. It would then copy the appropriate hal.dll file from the C: drive to the D: drive, mark the D: drive as active, hide the C: drive (both done using GDISK), and reboot. The Windows partition would then be booted into with the appropriate HAL, and it worked just fine.

To make this work, I would hide the C: partition using PartitionMagic, install Windows 2000 or XP to the 4GB FAT32 partition (which Windows saw as C:, since the 7MB partition was hidden), and then after I had everything the way that I needed it to be, the machine would be sysprep'ed and told to convert to NTFS on the next boot. I'd unhide the C: partition and mark it active using PartitionMagic, then I'd image the drive via Ghost.

If you want me to send you a compressed version of my C: drive (minus the DOS boot files, which you'll need to add from a DOS boot disk via "sys c:"), PM me with your email address and I'll .zip or .rar the files and email them or FTP them to you to look at.

Edited November 14, 2005 by cluberti

[pcombs]

.

.

.

To make this work, I would hide the C: partition using PartitionMagic, install Windows 2000 or XP to the 4GB FAT32 partition (which Windows saw as C:, since the 7MB partition was hidden), and then after I had everything the way that I needed it to be, the machine would be sysprep'ed and told to convert to NTFS on the next boot. I'd unhide the C: partition and mark it active using PartitionMagic, then I'd image the drive via Ghost.

.

.

.

I'll PM you...this seems more complex than I'd like to duplicate, but I'd like to experiment with it. I was just looking at an image in Ghost Explorer, thinking I might be able to make my image then simply substitute the appropriate HAL file directly into the image file. I can export any file I want from an image, but as for copying a new one in...seems Ghost Explorer won't allow me to edit an NTFS or "Image All" -type image. Grr...

[cluberti]

I've sent you an email to your email address. You'll want to build your images FAT32, running the "convert C: /fs:ntfs" command whilst sysprep is running - that way, you can inject files into your image post-ghost, but still have an NTFS image once the client has started it's sysprep magic.