sysprep and DHCP

[mcloum]

Hi folks,

 

Has anyone seen this before?

 

We have some PCs all of the same spec, board ram etc. We updated the image to SP3 and conficker patch etc and all the microsoft patches up till June this year. We sysprep the machine and upload it to our fog server no problem.

 

Once we deploy this image to the rest of the room the network cards will not pick up a DHCP address, but they do before we sysprep it. I thought it was sysprep taking out the LAN drivers but they all hardware is installed correctly. Even setting a static doesnt help.

 

The board is a MSI MS 7267 v4.2 with Realtek onboard lan. I have also tried just a straight XP SP2 image with no updates, same results. It just seems to be sysprep causing the problem.

 

Any ideas?

[timbo343]

We have kinda had the same problem with the on board realtek drivers on our NECs. We have found that if we just click cancel once logged on with network admin, the problem fixes it's self, but is very annoying. It seems to be missing one of the dll files it needs.

[mcloum]

Click cancel on what?

[Michael]

I suspect it's because the NIC drivers are not signed which requires you to re-install them manually after Sysprep has completed.

[mcloum]

No we've tried that, re-insatlling them does nothing. As a bodge job we're just not going to sysprep them and deal with a few duplicate name errors until we can sort it out.

[Michael]

So even with the network card visible in Device Manager with drivers installed you're saying it's not picking up an address from DHCP Server? And even with a static IP it doesn't find the domain? It could well be a switch problem possibly?

[mcloum]

Yup knocks it down to 10mbps and doesnt get an address. Static doest want to ping out either. Its not a switch problem as we have other machines on the same switch and these work fine. We have even switched it off to clear any port cache. Still no joy. daft thing is they work fine before we sysprep the machine. Must be something to do with sysprep.

[Michael]

Presumably you're booting into some pre-Windows environment, imaging the machines, rebooting, Sysprep, then logon to Windows.

 

Is the correct driver being loaded by Windows? There are quite a number of NIC variants from Realtek and most if not all require different drivers.

[mcloum]

No they boot via PXE and boot a linux kernel (FOG 0.27) and then dump the sysprep'd image on the hard drive.

 

The drivers are the same as the ones that havent been imaged. Basically we have 17 machines in this room that have never been sysprep'd so we wiped one, created the image and uploaded it. Dumped the image back on the PC and the network card doesnt get a IP....checked the drivers on a machine thats not been imaged yet and they are the same ones..... very strange.