Anybody moved to WDS and ImageX yet?

[PeterW]

HDD doesn't auto format when installing an image.

A small diskpart script is needed here, I have a few somewhere let me know if you would like me to post them here, also the diskpart version in WinPE2.0 is good enough to assign the fisrt fixed disk as disk 0 unlike the old version in WinPE 1.5 which would always assign empty removable drive slots as Disk 0 1 2 etc so you would have to use more scripts to pipie out the actual hdd.

 

WDS is great, but i find that at the moment it is severly lacking in a comprehensive HOWTO document - the doumentaion is available but very fragmented over several websites.

 

I feel your pain the system builder documentation isent much better. I will upload all the docs I have as there are some walkthroughs from the US SB team which might shed some light on some of the common problems.

[Quackers]

Finally got to the bottom of my hal.dll error, for some reason on the second machine even with no partitions the first one being made was being made partition 2, so the boot.ini was looking in the wrong place. All fixed now and loving WDS

[HodgeHi]

I have just run into an issue where my PC will now not boot from the Network. I get a blue screen of death stating that there has been a initialization failure occur while booting from the network.

 

I am trying to boot from a Server 2003 using service pack 2. What can i do to get this working. I need to ris asap as i have to rebuild all clients today!!?

[Gatt]

just had a hal.dll failure error - turned out to be a hidden OEM partition that i needed to get rid of (Base XP installed via RIS, but then used WDS to create image after that)

 

Anyone sussed how to deploy XP via WDS yet?

I can deploy Vista but not XP (hence why i used RIS above)

[PeterW]

Anyone sussed how to deploy XP via WDS yet?

 

Only by booting a winpe 2.0 image cleaning and partitioning the drive with diskpart, formatting the drive and writing a 2k/xp boot sector then running an unattended setup.

 

Still playing with WDS at the mo

[Gatt]

Ditto - been trying to use BDD2007 as well - to no avail

 

Also found that some of ly RIS images don't like being converted to WIM files so will prbably need to re-create them

 

I'm aming to eventually stop using RIS - but so far it looks like i'll need to keep it to get a Clean copy of XP onto the system

[HodgeHi]

I just didn't have the time to sit and try to get my head around the whole WDS thing. It could possibly be the easiest thing to do, just i have got enough to get my head around this holiday without adding to it.

This said i decided to use the legacy WDS, which supposedly is RIS. BUT it didn't work.

 

I don't know what MS have done to RIS but my clients just refused outright to boot from it. Couldn't find any info on resolving this issue and was losing time so i decided to remove sp2 and install sp1. So far so good all seemed well. I installed RIS services (the one before WDS) and installed fine. I proceeded to create the flat image from the winxp cd only to find that an OSC.cab (i think thats what it was called) was missing and so i couldn't really tell just how many of these issues i was going to run into.

 

I decided to re-install my DCs instead with SP1. Only took 1/2 hour and was backup. Don't think i will be using Sp2 just yet.

[ChrisH]

I had an issue with DHCP when I put SP2 on that machine. My Clients refused to boot into RIS. I had to go in and disable a few options to do with boot images and the like.

[HodgeHi]

My machines booted and then got to the point where it loads all the inital stuff then says starting windows. This is where it is supposed to format the HDD but instead i got the error message posted in my first post.

 

Why they can't just give the option to stick with either RIS (without any modifications, since my clients worked fine from RIS original) and just give the option to add WDS and allow conversion to the wim file system?

 

And why give the option to remove a service pack in the add/remove programs when the un-install just doesn't put the original files back. Surely it's just a desctructive un-install? Admittedly it would mean more file storage space to backup the previous versions but in this day and age the amount of disk storage needed in any network infrastructure would meet the requirements.

[srochford]

just had a hal.dll failure error - turned out to be a hidden OEM partition that i needed to get rid of (Base XP installed via RIS, but then used WDS to create image after that)

 

Anyone sussed how to deploy XP via WDS yet?

I can deploy Vista but not XP (hence why i used RIS above)

 

Please can you let me know what you did - I'm pretty sure I've got exactly the same problem - set up a laptop with XP etc all working; booted WinPE; captured image with imagex, restored to second laptop and all falls over :-(

 

They're Dell laptops and I'm sure they have such a partition - what do I do to put the image back properly??

 

thanks

[Gatt]

just had a hal.dll failure error - turned out to be a hidden OEM partition that i needed to get rid of (Base XP installed via RIS, but then used WDS to create image after that)

 

Anyone sussed how to deploy XP via WDS yet?

I can deploy Vista but not XP (hence why i used RIS above)

 

Please can you let me know what you did - I'm pretty sure I've got exactly the same problem - set up a laptop with XP etc all working; booted WinPE; captured image with imagex, restored to second laptop and all falls over :-(

 

They're Dell laptops and I'm sure they have such a partition - what do I do to put the image back properly??

 

thanks

 

Boot into WDS as if deploying an image

once logged on hit Shift+F10 to get a Command prompt

DISKPART
SELECT DISK 0
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
EXIT
EXIT

once the Command Prompot closes you can continue the image

[Midget]

So microsoft have managed to take something really useful and money saving and make it completely useless for people not using vista? great. guess I won't be installing SP2 for a while then

[tarquel]

For me, it seems to be so :(

 

Can't manage to PXE boot [both the tick boxes are checked under the DHCP tab in the settings for this server - as its on the same server as DHCP].

 

tosca - could you care to elaborate on what you said on the last page... how did you get your client machines to pxe boot?

 

The file doesnt seem to exist [boot\x86\pxeboot.com] and under the directory reminst\Boot\x86, the file doesnt exist either [tried using wdsnbp.com, but clutching straws here ]

 

I'll be making a how-to on all this, but i'll need a hand getting off the ground with my own installation first lol

 

Cheers

Nath

[Gatt]

@tarquel - did you copy the boot.wim file from a Vista Business/Enterprise DVD?

[mavhc]

I managed to get it working manually, without a vista DVD, some of my thoughts are at http://mavhc.blogspot.com/2007/09/things-i-havent-yet-forgotton-about-wds.html

 

Apparently it's possibly to switch between single and multi processor HALs, not tried this yet: http://www.myitforum.com/articles/15/view.asp?id=8997

 

It's quite nice in that all you need is to boot to winpe, then get a copy of the imagex file and the wim file you need, it can be stored anywhere you can get to, perhaps even USB drive.

 

When I'm not on site I can use a windows server vmware machine on my laptop to boot to winPE from.