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Thanks for all the views. I think I had better reply to my own post. Where I have rooms of 10 or more machines I ended up creating a batch file, repeating the same commands for each machine to prestage in A/D using comp name & MAC address and to associate the comp name to an unattend xml. Cheers

Hello folks, I have WDS up and running on server 2008 at my school. At the moment we are capturing and deploying XP images only. The process is automated using the unattented.xml & sysprep.inf files. The only tools I currently use to do this are: Sysprep to prep my XP image before capturing WDS for the capture/deployment. Notepad++ to edit the unattended files I have created. The whole process seems a bit long winded and certainly involves more prep work than when we used RIS, but our network manager wanted to move to WDS so no going back now! Are there better tools to help me manage this process? I am aware of MDT, Windows SIM & ImageX but I don't know if they would be any use. What setup do you use? Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks Pete

Hello, I have WDS setup and running on 2008 enterprise 32bit to deploy XP images. The system is working well with my unattend.xml/sysprep.inf and I can deploy captured images with a couple of key presses. Now I need to prestage multiple computers and associate them with their xml file. I use wdsutil to acheive this on my test machine; To prestage using MAC address WDSUtil /Add-Device /Device:computername /ID:00-20-ED-88-15-7B To associate my unattend xml WDSUtil /Set-Device /Device:computername /WDSClientUnattend:WDSClientUnattend\unattendhere.xml That works beautifully for my one test machine, but typing that for every machine in the school is going to be a bit of a bind. We have a list of all the MAC addresses so I just need a more automated way to prestage computers & associcate the XML. Is this the best way to do this? Should I be doing this another way? I have gone so far with WDS and spent a long time getting to grips with it, it will not beat me:confused: Any help greatly appreciated Pete