Thick Image for Windows 7 with injected drivers depending on build of machine

[ranj]

Hi

 

I am currently playing around with MDT2010 and WDS and attempting to create a thin image with just Windows 7 and then using MDT to add Office 2010 and other apps once Windows 7 has loaded, is on the domain and other customisations have been inserted onto the machine.

 

I am finding this is a lot more complex to configure, I have had success on using WISM to create an unattend script but there a few issues there and I am tempted to scrap all of this and create one thick image with all the apps we would want, sysprep it so we can deploy to lots of workstations. Similar to how we do it now.

 

Question I have is in which section would I want to inject drivers of a particular build of machine. If I did a thick image, deployed this with WDS, is it clever enough to deploy the image to a workstation, identify that this machine is a particular build with a certain processor, graphics card etc, and WDS pulls the driver information to that machine. Machine builds itself with the drivers and application and happy days.

 

Has anyone managed to put this into production?

 

Thanks

[mrbios]

I have a thick image with all our apps on (minus one or two i deploy via GP) this image is sitting in WDS, the drivers section of WDS (specific to 2008R2 if i remember correctly) has all the drivers for all the PCs around the entire school loaded into it, divided into folder catagorys for "network" "video" etc

 

When i image a machine no matter what the hardware the drivers for it are automatically detected from the best drivers to use in the WDS driver store, is that what you're after?

[ranj]

I have a thick image with all our apps on (minus one or two i deploy via GP) this image is sitting in WDS, the drivers section of WDS (specific to 2008R2 if i remember correctly) has all the drivers for all the PCs around the entire school loaded into it, divided into folder catagorys for "network" "video" etc

 

When i image a machine no matter what the hardware the drivers for it are automatically detected from the best drivers to use in the WDS driver store, is that what you're after?

 

Yes that is exactly what I am after. I need 2008 R2 for that? thats a shame as I am using 2008. Is there any hackable way to do this in plan 2008?

[DrCheese]

If your using MDT2010, then just add the drivers to the "out of the box drivers" section. Then as long as your task Sequence has "Inject drivers" in the pre and postinstall phases you will be ok.

 

Deploying Windows 7 - Part 24: Managing Drivers – Issues and Approaches

 

MDT is by far the better way to deploy 7 images than WDS alone, it's just a lot to get your head around it especially if your used to the XP way of doing things like I was.

 

For office and other apps, I've found it easier to just slap those on system itself and sysprep that up, using that image instead.

Edited June 11, 2010 by DrCheese