[RIS] Dell Optiplex 360 RIS

[brunanburh]

We have a large number of Dell Optiplex 360 machines to install over several sites.

Machine has a Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

When trying to create a RIS image the dreaded "The operating system image you selected does not contain the necessary drivers for your network adapter. Try selecting a different operating system image. If the problem persists, contact your administrator. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit." message appeared.

No matter which driver files (From Dell 0r Broadcom) were put into the $OEM$ or i386 folder and tweaks to inf files as per Broadcom Ethernet FAQs, could not get RIS to work.

Eventualy tracked down;
Broadcom.com - NetXtreme II 1 Gigabit Drivers
Go down the page to "Windows Remote Installation Service (RIS) Drivers" and download the appropriate Windows 2000 / 2003 Ris zip file. (zip file for Server 2003 attached) There is a readme for Server 2000.
Unzip the 2 files and put them in the i386 folder. Run - net stop / start binlsvc.
Voila - RIS deploys OS.

[Marc]

We had the same problem with broadcom and dells - problem is missing textmode drivers during the installation. We use autoimage/DPbase to automate RIS image creation. DPBase has a collection of textmode drivers to get around this issue. Takes a bit of figuring out but the links/notes below should help

LINKS:

DP_BASE Tutorial - DriverPacks.net Forum / DriverPacks BASE tutorial (English)
Create 3rd party driver packs - DriverPacks.net Forum / [Tutorial] Making your own DriverPacks for n00bs
Autoimage link - RogueSpear's Forums • View forum - AutoImage


STEP1:
Run dpbase before autoimage, tell it to use the downloaded driverpacks. DP_BASE Tutorial: DriverPacks.net Forum / DriverPacks BASE tutorial (English)
export dpbase settings for use in autoimage



STEP2:
overview Autoimage & RIS:


When you initially create a new RIS image you must copy the folder containg the flat image that is created when setting up RIS/WDS - rename this folder to your new image name and point autoimage to it as the source.



Once your initial image has been created, AutoImage will work with that by copying it down to the RIS temp folder on the workstation that you are running AutoImage from, note i run autoimage on our wds server so its all local even though its recommended not to run autoimage on the same server as RIS/WDS but it works for us!



1. In AutoImage go the Options menu. Select "Set RIS Temp Folder" and select the directory that you would like to use.

2. Source tab
Browse to the renamed copy of the default flat image you copied earlier. This will be the final image once autoimage does its thing.

Tick 'Integrate NIC drivers' - get these from the roguespear autoimage forum
Tick 'Decompress files afterprocessing' - driverpacks are in 7zip format so the need to be deompressed before windows can use them in installation.

Tick 'Integrate User template file' - this will be a .sif file containing all the custom settings you want to automate when windows installs, e.g. regional settings etc. We simply modified one we created using sysprep.

Do not tick keep ristndrd.sif - used only by the defualt windows image.


2. nLite/DP tab
tick 'use Driverpacks BASE'
Driverpacks configuraion file - browse to the .ini created in step 1

Click 'start'!