OemPreinstall=Yes unbroken!

[LocoBenno]

Hi, newbie here, I've found this site an invaluable resource in the past and pledged that one day, if I found something that can help, I'd sign up and share it. I've seen a few alternative methods posted around but not this one, and I apologise if I've missed it somewhere. But here goes...

I've been putting together a RIS environment to deploy i386 and x64 versions of Win2K3 - we're a HP ProLiant shop with 190 servers and counting - and had previously been spending thousands of bucks licensing LiveState Recovery for each of them. So I piped up and suggested RIS as a no-cost option for initial deployment of server images. I'd used RIS extensively in previous jobs to deploy workstations so I knew a ton about it. Into the fray I stepped, and of course the first hitch was to get past that pesky "F6" section of the windows build.

Now most of the doco out there (including Micro$oft's) say that you can't use OemPreinstall=Yes if you are deploying MassStorageDrivers via the TEXTMODE setup. "Bollocks!" I said, that totally kills my $OEM$ tree of apps, drivers and such that will make my image as a whole hands free. The last two days I've been racking the brain in white papers and forums, then I thought I'd step out and just try something different; lo and behold:

The doco suggests for TEXTMODE setup, you build the image tree as such:

.\<ImageName>\i386\$OEM$\TEXTMODE

...and as long as OemPreinstall=No, the "F6" portion will work. And it does sure enough. BUT, if you move the TEXTMODE folder to:

.\<ImageName>\$OEM$\$1\SETUP\APPS

.\<ImageName>\$OEM$\$1\SETUP\DRIVERS

.\<ImageName>\$OEM$\$$\Resources

.\<ImageName>\$OEM$\$$\System32

.\<ImageName>\$OEM$\TEXTMODE

.\<ImageName>\i386

...and remove it from under i386, it works! No more copying files in CMDLINES.TXT, no more scripting funky scripts, it simply works just like it ought to. Giddyup!!!

I hope this helps out. Please let me know if I've just lucked onto something glitchy (what a great glitch to have btw ) and unique to my build. My RIS installation is by the numbers defaults all the way through, and I'm using RIS images built from setupmgr.exe with additions. No CMDLINES.TXT; apps and tweaks I'm doing using [GuiRunOnce].

Cheers and beers

Benno

Edited July 7, 2006 by LocoBenno