Remote Installation Services (RIS)

[Dos_Box]

You don't partition your server OS? Naughty, naughty!

[ChrisH]

When I installed it I didnt see the point as it was just going to have exchange on it and a few printers :?

[Dos_Box]

With Exchange it is best to have it live on its own partition in cases of emergencies anyway!!
The rule of thumb is to never install anything onto the server OS partiton. Let the OS have 20 GB and partiton the rest off.

[Geoff]

Yep thats what I've been doing. 20Gb C: for Windows. 20Gb D: for User files. The rest as E: for Software which kinda covers everything else.

[ChrisH]

My other servers are setup like you say Chris just this one I didnt. I should be getting the rest of the servers in the near future so RIS can co habit with one of those. I may also move exchange onto another box with a bit more attitude so all is not lost .

[kingswood]

Hi.

New here, so go easy

RIS actually works with a service called SISG (Single Instance Storage Groveller) and this means that you can have several "images" of XP on your RIS partition (and it should be on a separate partition from your boot/system one, preferably a separate physical disk) but that service will search those images and figure out when those multiple images are using the exact same file and keep only one copy of that file in a separate location, using instead of duplicate files a pointer to it from each copy it finds! This is where you should see significant disk space savings over keeping several ghost images on your server.

With Ghost images (and we use these too but are moving to RIS/RIPREP), you don't get this. So, on our new server we have an RIS volume and within this at the most three images. The SISG service reduces the size of these by marking out files that are identical and pointing to one file of that type. With Ghost you would have three separate images.

Why can't you use RIS on a system partition? Well, if you think, it "grovels" those similar files and makes a pointer to only one and shares that file out..what would happen on your system drive? Wouldn't like to say 8O

In all I think RIS is a great service (and free) so thanks for the articles and pointers.

Hopefully this has helped someone! lol!

Paul

[ChrisH]

Ah yes I remember the groveller now . Would be nice if that kind of magic could be used in other areas as well.

[Inox]

Guys do any of u have experience cloning either Acer 4601LCI laptops using RIS (as al I keep getting is a message saying that "THIS IMAGE DOES NOT INCLUDE THE NETWORK CARD DRIVES FOR THIS MACHINE, TRY ANOTHER IMAGE").

or

a broadcom 57xx network card which I think is whats in these (although they do have WiFi built in too).

[Ric_]

This Knowledge Base article is what you need.

Don't forget to restart the RIS service

[Inox]

Originally Posted by Ric_

This Knowledge Base article is what you need.

Don't forget to restart the RIS service

ok m8 i'll give that a go ta

[kingswood]

Hey.

Have you tried a "Remote Boot" floppy? Having said that, if you can initially put an RIS image onto your machine, the suggestion Ric_ gave is the best option. If you can't get an RIS image onto your machine, you might want to try a remote boot floppy (though this is pretty limited in the cards it supports).

Good luck- we recently bought some Acer laptops to replace some that were stolen, and can't get rid *at all* of the partitions on it!!

Paul

[Inox]

Originally Posted by kingswood

Hey.

Have you tried a "Remote Boot" floppy? Having said that, if you can initially put an RIS image onto your machine, the suggestion Ric_ gave is the best option. If you can't get an RIS image onto your machine, you might want to try a remote boot floppy (though this is pretty limited in the cards it supports).

Good luck- we recently bought some Acer laptops to replace some that were stolen, and can't get rid *at all* of the partitions on it!!

Paul

The remote boot floppy doesn't support Broadcom cards at all m8, and the laptop's dont come with floppy drives ;-p

Got them working now, once I know how I did it i'll post a fix on here as the above MS guide didn't work, nor did 10+ other guides.

How do you mean u can't get rid of the other partitions ?

Which partitions? The ones we have come with EISA partition, c: and d:

I have reformatted the laptop and merged the c and d partitions and have left the EISA partition alone.

If u need help lemmi know.

[kingswood]

Glad you got them working!

I didn't think remote boot floppies would help (I knew they didn't come with floppy drives but figured you would have an external USB floppy device handy- that's what we do with systems without them).

Our upper site (where we use the laptops) is a managed solution, so for various reasons we can't tamper too much with the machines. But I can tell you that diskpart and partition magic, a call to Acer support, and a second call to our support provider turned up nothing! What happens is that the machines come with three partitions (one hidden), and when these are wiped on reboot they are magically there again! Ghost has a hell of a time trying to make sense of it all, and even when we get the Ghost image onto them, when we reboot the system hangs at "no operating system" or similar (even after setting the partition as active).

I even tried recovery console and things like "fixmbr", to no avail.

If you do have any ideas, I'm all ears! ops:

Paul

[RobC]

Kingswood, have you tried fdisking the laptops? Or the other alternative is Gdisk that comes with ghost. I haven't actually used Gdisk myself, but AFAIK it can deal with any hidden partitions on the disk.

[kingswood]

Hi RobC.

Actually I have tried FDISK, but I haven't looked at GDISK. That's a good point. I will try that one when I go back in.

Thanks for the heads up!

Paul