I know, osoudns redundant, but I have problems getting through the documentation in a way that leads to a result. Too much information too distributed.

I am planning a rollout for Windows Vista to a smaller development team. I want to use WDS because of the convenience of having the images on the network. Setup should be automated but stil lrequire manual entry of the license code, as developers get their own one to use. I ahve various machiens around that have various nic's, so capturing one bare image seems not to be a good solution.

I managed to not get anything done the last days, so this is a fresh start. I am installing a new virtual sever at the moment with WDS - and am in the stage of installing the images in the configuration.

My main questions:

* The boot.wim seems not to have any network card drivers installed. How it the recommended approach to set them up? WAIK? So far so good, but where the heck do aI get a good collection of those? Vista itself seems to have ample. Example: I use a NForce 4 based computer. Booting from WDS gets me a no driver found for the nic, booting into a dvd installed vista - works. Any way to tap into this driver pool? Or is it like the RIS times (which just sucked) where I have to go out and try to get things forking (yeah, nforce 4) somehow.

* Cutomzation, I assuem, should be done using the WAIK tool to create the unattended answer file?

Ok, I am finally making progress. Got a new WDS install and things work.

My main problem now is the answer file. Somehow I seem to be unable to get the answer file editor from WAIK to actually- well - work. It complaints about the catalog being outdated and crashes on rebuild.

Ok, I am finally making progress. Got a new WDS install and things work.

My main problem now is the answer file. Somehow I seem to be unable to get the answer file editor from WAIK to actually- well - work. It complaints about the catalog being outdated and crashes on rebuild.

Try running the WAIK answer file editor on Vista itself - I've had little luck running it under XP.

I sort of hate to tell it, but yes, that works.

It does not work under WIndows 2003, and not under XP - just under Vista for me.

Thanks.