Imaging machines with different hardware - Drivers

[timbo343]

Hi All

 

Glad to see Edugeek back again.

 

I think this has been talked about before, but we have multiple basica images for different rooms and it would be great if we could put all the drivers on one image but i dunno where to put them all.

 

Can someone help?

 

Thanks

 

Tim

[contink]

I use either autoimage with driverpacks or just nlite.. .

 

Nlite has a couple of minor glitches but usually they come down to it not copying across redundant files like readme.htm.

 

Used it all successfully for a few workstations in the past though and recently a couple of laptop types..

[DMcCoy]

Sysprep?

[timbo343]

We use sysprep at the mo.

 

I might have a look at autoimage and see what that does.

[contink]

Sysprep will IIRC only handle the one machine you're installing to and not any additional drivers whereas Autoimage in tandem with the various tools it pulls together, can insert various drivers, applications, addons, etc... that can be used for multiple hardware setups.

 

It's not an exact science though and does require a lot of patience, time and testing to get it right...

[timbo343]

is autoimage free?

[DMcCoy]

Sysprep will IIRC only handle the one machine you're installing to and not any additional drivers whereas Autoimage in tandem with the various tools it pulls together, can insert various drivers, applications, addons, etc... that can be used for multiple hardware setups.

 

It's not an exact science though and does require a lot of patience, time and testing to get it right...

 

Unless you use the feature in sysprep to detect and install drivers

 

I have one image that installs drivers for several different machines, I build it on vmware in fact, without any device drivers. All just done with the driver paths option in sysprep (with a little inf file tweaking on the drivers to stop tray apps etc).

[sparkeh]

Doesn't sysprep only work for identical hardware?

 

EDIT: Damn my slow response

[contink]

is autoimage free?

 

Yep... as are all the tools it pulls in... nlite, ryanvm, wmpslipstreamer, driverpacks, scriptpacks, etc...

 

You'll need to register on the forums to get the releases too...

[contink]

@Gibbo.

 

Sysprep is one of the tools to create the image for Windows Deployment Service or RIS Remote Installation Service (?).

 

The benefits of RIS/WDS over Ghosting have been discussed at length so I'd check those over using search... For my money though RIS is a {deity} send... but I prefer to use RIS for the basic install with drivers then GPO for application installs whilst scripts can handle non-redeployable apps as silent installs on the first login.

 

It's a confusing mess I can tell you

[srochford]

What are the exact benefits of sysprep? At two schools I've worked at they just build the image, give it a name like IT1-MST get it on the domain and fully tested, then remove it from the domain and ghost it.

 

Then, after a room is ghosted you just have to rename it and join it to the domain. (ignoring the duplicate name warning you'll get)

 

Would sysprep make it any easier or is it just a more automated (wizards?) way of doign the above?

 

Key thing about sysprep is that it makes sure that you don't get two (or more!) machines with the same SID (security identifier - the thing which "really" identifies the machine to Windows). Most of the time having multiple machines with the same SID doesn't matter (and there are other ways of changing the SID) but if you don't change SID then it will come back and bite you at some point.

 

Sysprep can handle the rename for you (at minimum it can give the machine a random name so you don't get errors at start up; may not matter but it means you can't have a "run-once" script which (say) connects to a network server and does some finishing off.

[srochford]

I think this has been talked about before, but we have multiple basica images for different rooms and it would be great if we could put all the drivers on one image but i dunno where to put them all.

 

 

We have a folder called "drivers" on the c: drive of our base image and in there go all the drivers we have. Sysprep.inf then contains:

[unattended]

OEMPnpDriversPath=drivers

 

(note you don't include the c:\ bit)

 

and as the machine restarts it picks up the drivers it needs.

 

I wrote about WIM files earlier but this is one of the areas where they are fabulous - the laptops we're now buying need a raft of different drivers so all you do is mount the WIM file, copy in the drivers, unmount and save and you're good to go. With Ghost you'd have had to restore the image to a machine, boot it with Windows PE (or similar), copy the files, load the image back to the server and all this can take an hour compared to perhaps 10 minutes for editing the WIM

[timbo343]

We have a folder called "drivers" on the c: drive of our base image and in there go all the drivers we have. Sysprep.inf then contains:

[unattended]

OEMPnpDriversPath=drivers

 

(note you don't include the c:\ bit)

 

and as the machine restarts it picks up the drivers it needs.

 

I wrote about WIM files earlier but this is one of the areas where they are fabulous - the laptops we're now buying need a raft of different drivers so all you do is mount the WIM file, copy in the drivers, unmount and save and you're good to go. With Ghost you'd have had to restore the image to a machine, boot it with Windows PE (or similar), copy the files, load the image back to the server and all this can take an hour compared to perhaps 10 minutes for editing the WIM

 

Right ok, thanks for that. It sounds like we might go down that route.

 

cheers

[timbo343]

Quick question, whats a WIM file???

 

Thanks

[torledo]

Key thing about sysprep is that it makes sure that you don't get two (or more!) machines with the same SID (security identifier - the thing which "really" identifies the machine to Windows). Most of the time having multiple machines with the same SID doesn't matter (and there are other ways of changing the SID) but if you don't change SID then it will come back and bite you at some point.

 

Sysprep can handle the rename for you (at minimum it can give the machine a random name so you don't get errors at start up; may not matter but it means you can't have a "run-once" script which (say) connects to a network server and does some finishing off.

 

At my last place of work, back when we were using boot floppies to deploy the corporate driveimage, one of the bods created a batchfile that loaded during the boot sequence that prompted the operator for computername, administrator name/pass and domain to join the computer to (just before the standard image was pulled down from a network share) - not sure on the specifics but i believe the prompts and captured info were done using a couple of obscure batch commands, enquire.exe change.exe. Various ini files were modified as a result...

 

...the script would then complete, diskpart commands would kick in driveimage would run and voila 20 minutes later you had a completed machine without manually needing to remove and rejoin from the domain. This method of naming was done because of the limitations of the syspreps computer naming facility....even today i think it was an ingenious solution, but made somewhat redundant by modern pxe-imaging and image deployment management consoles like WDS. Although even with the current advancements, significant out-of-the-box thinking is required to achieve zero-touch targeted computer naming of imaged machines.

 

Agree with contink, that the options surrounding OS/apps deployment are at times a bit bewildering....wish we could just use server based computing for everything and not have to deal with deployment. period. Not that building citrix farms doesn't come with it's own problems.

[DMcCoy]

Some key points

 

Sysprep is for preparing an image to run on the same or ANOTHER computer, identical or not. This is why the option to run the pnp detection after boot is added. You can create a syspreped machine and then take a disk image of it with whatever imaging application you want, you do not have to use RIS/WDS if you don't want to.

 

Sysprep can:

 

Change chipset types (AMD to Intel, VIA etc)

Change harddisk driver (with the bmsd option to create the mass storage section on the sysprep.inf)

Change Uni to multi cpu

Install drivers with minisetup wizard.

 

Sysprep can't:

Move images between ACPI and no ACPI machines.

[djones]

midteq - Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

 

MySysprep is a tool that can be used in place/with Sysprep to allow you to move between ACPI and non ACPI machines although this is beginning to be redundant now.

Edited July 11, 2008 by djones

[timbo343]

Thanks for the posts, Ive got sysprep working fine with all our drivers. Works a treat.

 

Thanks again

 

Tim

[srochford]

Quick question, whats a WIM file???

 

Thanks

 

It's the file format used by ImageX - the MS deployment tool. It's a bit like a Ghost image file (.GHO) but more versatile.

 

One of the things which can be done with it is to include multiple machine images in 1 WIM file. When they are created, ImageX does "single instance storage" so if you have (say) a staff and student image in the same file, the chances are that a lot of files are common (the whole of Windows, for example) so the image file is much smaller.

 

If you install WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) then you get the ability to mount a WIM file so it appears as a folder on your local machine - you can add files to it, edit files, remove files, work on the registry etc etc.

 

I think it's brilliant :-)

[torledo]

It's the file format used by ImageX - the MS deployment tool. It's a bit like a Ghost image file (.GHO) but more versatile.

 

One of the things which can be done with it is to include multiple machine images in 1 WIM file. When they are created, ImageX does "single instance storage" so if you have (say) a staff and student image in the same file, the chances are that a lot of files are common (the whole of Windows, for example) so the image file is much smaller.

 

If you install WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) then you get the ability to mount a WIM file so it appears as a folder on your local machine - you can add files to it, edit files, remove files, work on the registry etc etc.

 

I think it's brilliant :-)

 

agreed. I've actually been trying to create an XP wim image of a macbook to deploy on a macbook air using winpe. Both the image and winpe boot files did fit onto a single dvd - that's without specifying the compress maximum option in imagex. Unfortunately have been getting errors with \Boot\BCD files, and ofcourse the Macbook air's single usb port requires some creative thinking so i haven't got it to work....but nonetheless the wim format i'm liking.

 

I'm less impressed with winpe, but the advantage of winpe is that it can create bootable usb sticks to image machines that can't PXE boot for whatever reason.

 

I think the way forward is to use all the tools in the WAIK kit and deploy using WDS on windows server 2008. With the wim image editing utility installed along with the WAIK tools it's pretty much a one-stop shop for everything image related once the deployment tools are downloaded. Plus WDS now supports multicast.

 

Also, one of the software assurance features in some of the volume licensing packages, provides the opportunity to attend a deployment workshop. Not sure on the specifics.

[wire]

If you want to include a LOT of drivers in your baseimage have a look at this neat little app, works a treat!

 

Vernalex.com - Welcome

[alexknight]

Does anyone have a link to autoimage?

 

Thanks

 

Alex

[wire]

Try

 

RogueSpear's Forums • View forum - AutoImage

[Bobo]

 

Sysprep can:

 

Change chipset types (AMD to Intel, VIA etc)

Change harddisk driver (with the bmsd option to create the mass storage section on the sysprep.inf)

Change Uni to multi cpu

Install drivers with minisetup wizard.

 

Sysprep can't:

Move images between ACPI and no ACPI machines.

 

 

I have found that trying to get 64bit AMD and 32bit intel be it the same HAL to talk to each other with various different methods almost impossible!