[wds] Create a W7 Image with DriverPacks

[soveryapt]

Right, I'm just about to embark on the image creation for the school. Now, the beauty is that for most of the machines, I should be able to set up a machine and do an image capture (not done it before, but I should be able to figure it out) however, what I wondered was, is is possible to setup a W7 Image with Driver Packs so that it will deploy no matter what the hardware is I'm putting it to?

 

I've taken a look at the WDS Sticky, however, it's blocked by NetSweeper in LCC (requested an unblock, but those in the LCC area know how long that could take).

 

Many thanks

Andy

[john]

Have you got MDT on your WSD Server? If not I would get MDT added on (its free) and it makes deploying Windows 7 a walk in the park. It still uses WDS for the PXE Booting but you boot into MDT instead and it can be setup to ask you to select the hardware and at that point you select from your pre-made list a folder of drivers for that PC etc it really is a great free tool, takes a bit of config to get going (took me about half a day to get it all setup, working and deploying images) BUT its so invaliable I wouldn't be without it at all

[strawberry]

you can use a driver pack, but in honesty they make an image bulky and add deployment time. You'd be better off adding common drivers then using somehting like mdt to pillage driver cds. MDt can import all the drivers from one location so things like hp cd's can be a goldmine. You can also use something like double driver to extract drivers from current installations.

[soveryapt]

Are there any good MDT Howtos out there?

[deano]

check out Edutechnow.com

 

Alan Richards has wrote some interesting articles that helped me out a lot