Deploying W7 with WDS - ignores unattend file

[Gatt]

Only for the SetupUI part - the rest can be in en-GB

tho, I have all mine set to en-GB and it doesnt appear to cause an issue.....

[Reaper]

Sadly that didn't make any difference

[Reaper]

What did make a difference was directly attaching the answer file to the image in WDS. I know this is on various sets of instructions but previous I haven't done this and the image has used the Answer file that I have sysprepped it with and stored in the System32\Sysprep folder.

So this now seems to be fixed, not entirely what I managed to do last week that stopped it working how it has done for the last few months but I'm glad that it is working!

Thanks for your help guys, always appreciated. Now hopefully off to image 40 machines via Multicast

[Reaper]

Just a quick update, it happened again this morning! But! It seems if I add a new image to the WDS server and then link an Answer file to it I have to restart the WDS service before deploying it. After that it seems to be Ok.

[SCSI]

Just a quick update, it happened again this morning! But! It seems if I add a new image to the WDS server and then link an Answer file to it I have to restart the WDS service before deploying it. After that it seems to be Ok.

Thanks for the tip. Maybe someone here can help me with my WDS Unattend problem. My problem with the WDS Unattend that I created is that it only creates one partition. How can I configure WDS Unattend to create the 100MB System reserve partition and and 2nd partition for Windows?

Right now, the partitioning is done manually by me.

Also when imaging using WDS, is it possible to image both partitions at once?

[Reaper]

I think my WDS unattend has the setup to do the partitioning but I'm not convinced it actually does it. Though this hasn't affected the machines I've installed the image to.

[cromertech]

The section in my Unattend file that deals with disk partitioning looks like this. I used Windows System Image Manager to author the file and it has been working reliably since I first used it

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <DiskConfiguration>
                <Disk wcm:action="add">
                    <CreatePartitions>
                        <CreatePartition wcm:action="add">
                            <Order>1</Order>
                            <Size>100</Size>
                            <Type>Primary</Type>
                        </CreatePartition>
                        <CreatePartition wcm:action="add">
                            <Extend>true</Extend>
                            <Order>2</Order>
                            <Type>Primary</Type>
                        </CreatePartition>
                    </CreatePartitions>
                    <ModifyPartitions>
                        <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add">
                            <Active>true</Active>
                            <Format>NTFS</Format>
                            <Label>System</Label>
                            <Order>1</Order>
                            <PartitionID>1</PartitionID>
                        </ModifyPartition>
                        <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add">
                            <Format>NTFS</Format>
                            <Label>Windows</Label>
                            <Order>2</Order>
                            <PartitionID>2</PartitionID>
                        </ModifyPartition>
                    </ModifyPartitions>
                    <DiskID>0</DiskID>
                    <WillWipeDisk>true</WillWipeDisk>
                </Disk>
                <WillShowUI>OnError</WillShowUI>
            </DiskConfiguration>

edit this works for one hard drive. You need to fiddle with the DiskID value if you don't want it installed on the first drive

[gerardsweeney]

Modified my unattend file to change the locale settings and it worked!

Thanks for that - would never have guessed that one!

I'm in a similar situation, so I'll definitely be giving this a bash on Monday since I'm sure I changed the language settings.

What I don't get is this - WAIK weighs in at a fairly beefy 1.5-odd Gb. Why, then, in the name of all that is holy do we have to manually TYPE in the language and timezones? It - surely - couldn't be beyond the reaches of MS to make them listboxes?

And if it is changing the language which borks the unattanded, why make it an option??

Grr...

Thanks very much for the unattended.xml files which have been posted - hopefully they'll give me something to play with on Monday (fnar! Ed).

Regards,
Gerard