RIS VS WDS

[wibble]

Hey guys,

I have just started to look at using remote tools to deploy images to my workstations. I have been reading up on RIS and it seems a nicer way of setting up a PC than to have to manually go through the process of putting an unattended cd in and waiting for it to work then move the cd on etc.

So I have just gone to me 2003 SP2 server and seen that Windows Deployment Services has taken the place of RIS. I have gone through the process and rebooted and got my WDS icon and also the legacy icon that appears to run risetup.

I have jumped into WDS and completed the little startup wizard and now I am being asked for my .wim image file. Now everything I am looking at seems to point to the fact that this needs to come from a sysprep'd image of an XP install which would be fine if I had lots of identical machines but what I would like is to have an install that will do a generic XP install and then let me push out other bits and pieces as is required.

My reading on RIS seemed to indicate this was possible by pointing the RISETUP at your i386 folder and then customising it all with an answer file or post install.

I currently dont have any RIS images and I am unable to get into the legacy RISETUP i get an error saying that I cant run it on a WDS that is already configured.

My reason for posting is:

If I made a base install of XP on machine X then sysprep'd it its going to have all the drivers etc for that computer and then when I apply that image to another machine with a different spec I will have all sorts of drivers that I don't want on the system.

Is there, therefore, a way that allows me to create an image based on the i386 folder of my xp cd that can be deployed to any machine that meets the requirements?

Any help is much appreciated guys.

Kind regards,

WDS newbie

[cyprids]

WDS has 3 modes - Legacy, Mixed and Native mode. Only Legacy and Mixed mode works with RIS. To get to one of the "RIS" modes you need to install RIS (no setup needed though) before you apply SP2. If not, you only have WDS in Native mode.

[crobe]

I would love to be corrected if this is wrong, but I believe if you want to install XP in the way you want you have to use RIS or WDS in mixed or legacy mode, which is the same as RIS. it sounds like server 2008 will not support these WDS modes so it looks like companies deploying XP using risetup vs riprep for the foreseeable future will have a 2k3 server for the foreseeable future. again I would love to be corrected if there is a way for regular WDS to set up a cd based install of XP.

[wibble]

Hey guys thanks for the responses. I have rolled back from sp2 back to sp1 and been able to get RIS installed and setup successfully. I did find that when I re upgraded to SP2 and installed WDS I have been able to use my old risetup images which is brilliant

Many thanks for the help