WDS and XP

[Homeland]

I do apologise if this has been asked before but I am new to this side of things,

 

I have recently taken up a new position in a school and have had a look at the way they perform some of their tasks at the moment, one thing that came to light was when I was watching the technician sit at a single pc installing Windows 7 and all associated software for around 5 hours ???

 

I was bewildered when he said this is what they normally do, when I mentioned WDS and MSI deployment he didn’t know what I was talking about. So this afternoon I have setup and configured WDS as well as the MSI deployments as required.

 

My question is though is there anyway of setting up XP to deploy via WDS as our nursery pc’s still run on it due to the children’s software they still use, ‘tizzys toybox etc.’, with the newer OS’s it was easy to direct to the source folder and set up from the .wim files but XP doesn’t have these.

[OhDear]

You need to capture it back if I remember correctly. It's much easier to use MDT... Or upgrade to 7

[Homeland]

You need to capture it back if I remember correctly. It's much easier to use MDT... Or upgrade to 7

 

We cant upgrade to 7 as most of the software they use wont run on it, I have tried to get them to replace the software with something newer but I dont think there interested.

[Duke5A]

Windows XP will deploy with WDS no problem. Be sure to remove all disk partitioning options from your sysprep.inf before syspreping the reference machine and capture with imagex. Import the captured WIM into WDS and place your sysprep folder onto the WDS server here:

 

WDSRemote\Images\[i][/i]\[i][/i]\$OEM$\$1

[Homeland]

It's much easier to use MDT...

 

What actually is MDT ???

[MYK-IT]

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

 

I am sure others will advise of other websites and resources, but i found the books from Deployment Fundamentals > Home to be easy, and logical to follow.

I bought the hard copies (old skool!) but I think they are available on ebooks (cheaper).

[free780]

Tell them after 1 year the xp machines will "stop working". Does driver injection work with xp? Or do you need an image for each pc?

[Homeland]

Not to sure yet, I have just walked in the office and am going to have a good play with it today as well as WAIK and MDT, I will keep you posted.

[Homeland]

Ok so I have managed to setup WAIK & MDT it created a LiteTouchPEx86.wim file in the Deployment Share \ Boot folder.

 

I then went into WDS and added the .wim file to the boot images, so everything looked all ok, I have made changes to the bootstrap.ini as follows;

 

[settings]

Priority=Default

Properties=MyCustomProperty

[Default]

UserID=administrator

UserDomain=xxxxxx.com

UserPassword=xxxxxx

[DefaultGateway]

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx=appserver

[sITE1]

DeployRoot=\\appSERVER\DeploymentShare$

OSInstall=YES

SkipBDDWelcome=YES

SkipAdminPassword=YES

SkipBitLocker=YES

SkipCapture=YES

SkipComputerName=YES

SkipComputerBackup=YES

SkipDeploymentType=YES

DeploymentType=NEWCOMPUTER

SkipDomainMembership=YES

SkipSummary=YES

 

I also defined the product key in the initial setup for Windows 7 but it still keeps asking me for a lot of the information and does not update the product key for me either, have I missed something ???

[free780]

Bootstrap.ini processes before the main wizard. Are you trying to do a capture or just deploy the os ?

[Homeland]

Just trying to deploy the os, but wanted it to put the key in and activate windows as well.

[Homeland]

Can somebody please tell me where I can find the customsettings.ini file ???

[Homeland]

Found it thank you.

[Homeland]

Ok could you please tell me if I have missed something as I have got MDT working and at the moment I am really impressed with it although I have a couple of minor snags I’m hoping you can help with.

 

For some reason even though I have put the information in it still insists I haven’t put the deployment share credentials in (highlighted in yellow).

 

Also when the process is running it puts the domain username and password in but not the domain itself (highlighted in green).

 

Am I doing something wrong because other than that its working great, it places itself on the domain then slots into the appropriate OU then when I reboot the MSI files kick in and start to install job done.

 

[settings]

Priority=Default

[Default]

UserDomain=MyDomain

UserID= administrator

UserPassword=secure password

 

DeployRoot=\\APPSERVER\DeploymentShare$

OSInstall=YES

ProductKey=xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx

SkipProductKey=YES

SkipBDDWelcome=YES

SkipDomainMembership=NO

TimeZoneName=GMT Standard Time

SkipAdminPassword=YES

SkipBitLocker=YES

SkipCapture=YES

SkipComputerName=NO

SkipComputerBackup=YES

SkipDeploymentType=YES

DeploymentType=NEWCOMPUTER

 

SkipFinalSummary=YES

SkipUserData=YES

SkipLocaleSelection=YES

KeyboardLocale=0809:00000809

UserLocale=en-GB

UILanguage=en-GB

SkipComputerName=NO

 

SkipTimeZone=YES

TimeZoneName=GMT Standard Time

 

 

DomainAdmin=administrator

DomainAdminPassword=secure password

JoinDomain=MyDomain

 

WSUSServer=http://APPSERVER

[free780]

Do you put the domain as the fqdn not just the netbios name?

[Homeland]

I have tried both and neither worked but just read in the help file that the format should be DomainAdminDomain=MyDomain, so I have just edited the boostrap.ini and customsettings.ini and will find out if it works tomorrow.