szachara

Thanks for the answers guys. To answer your questions. Let me elaborate. We are a school district with about 14 sites and 4000 computers. We image computers for both staff and students. So we will take one site as an example: School A: optiplex 745 and 755 latitude d530 this is the layout of most of our elementary schools. however we have two images: 1 for d530 and 1 for the two model desktops. what requires a different image is the site specific software such as the SMARTBOARD software (which means two more images) or PROMETHEAN (two more images). This is the same kind of formula for our middle schools. our high school has specific software even for labs and there are multiple images for that alone. i would say at the high school there is about 10+ images alone( 1 room for Autocad Suite, 1 image for Maya, etc.) Then take our staff images which are similar to the software on the student machines but different all together. If using MDT along with WDS is more beneficial than WDS by itself, I am all for trying it out. I guess I would need to figure out how to translate some of our after desktop scripts into that process. would pushing packages to a base image really save time or just disc space?

We are using WDS currently and we are running it with Server 2008 on a fairly old server (IBM eserver xseries 235) and we have about 200 GB worth of space available for all of our district images (we have about 4000 devices to image) Right now we have close to 1 TB worth of images. with the space being limited, we copy images over from our external drive to WDS as needed. Very time consuming. so we are looking at basically starting over with a new server where we can start off with the right amount of space for our images so we do not have to copy back and forth all the time. What I am working on, to cut down the amount of our images is to inject drivers (something we had not done to this point) so that will cut down on the headache a bit. I would not think we would need much as far as server specs go, but we do a pretty good amount of imaging and want something sturdy. My question is, since we will probably be getting a new(er) server, what kind of specs do you think we would need or comparatively, what do you guys currently use for your WDS server? thanks for any assistance you can provide. steve

Is anyone who uses WDS familiar with this tweak? It basically tells Windows during the mini-setup of a systm to keep the drivers that were installed on the system instead of Windows looking for and installing its own drivers? We started using this to fix issues with our display drivers on our computers, but it seems to break the touchpad utility that gets installed when installing the mouse driver on a windows 7 computer. to explain further, when you install the mouse driver on a laptop, the dell Tpad utility is loaded when windows starts up into the taskbar, so users can click there and tweak their settings for their mouse. wwe tie up our image and use the switch in our sysprep file, and then when we deploy our image, and the while the driver for the mouse stays, the utility never loads. the only way to get it to load properly is the reinstall the driver. i have found limited info on this so i am coming to the experts for help. thanks, steve

We are trying to possibly move away from Ghost for our XP images. We currently use WDS for our Windows 7 images. We are trying to do the following: 1. capture our windows xp using the XP sysprep utility using the answer file we created for it. 2. use WDS to capture the image and then use it to deploy it. do we need to create another boot image for capturing an XP image?

i am running into issues running netop vision on a dell tablet with win 7 pro. however a dell laptop with win 7 pro seems to run fine. on the tablet, when i connect to a classroom i am getting "vision client not found" on all the machines. I can ping them by name from the tablet, but just not anything else. on the laptop, i connect to the same classroom and i am able to see the computers no problem.

so if i am reading this right, I can almost do what I do with XP with 7 in that: i can just install the software and drivers that I want and then use sysprep to reseal the setup. i just need to create the answer file for the mini-setup process. Do i need to call it unattend.xml or sysprep.xml, or does it matter? do i need to boot windows into audit mode if i am going to just install and reseal? or can i just install as i normally would and just use sysprep. i will be capturing the image using ghost. ---------------------------------------------- also just wondering how people handling imaging at multiple sites. we typically build our images in our office and then go on site to deploy them. we don't have anything setup through our servers for package deploying or image deploying. that is something i would like to investigate and see if we can make work for us if it is feasable. thanks again for the help. this forum has been a huge help.

If so, how would you say it compares to Microsoft's deployment tools like WDS or MDT as far as getting software packages images pushed out? we were looking at altiris as an option for our organization but it was way too expensive. just wondering how much it differs.

I take that back. I just tested it on my PC. The first time I ran the kid pix installer, it failed out saying it could not find the location. I then ran it again and it worked.

we have tried it and the quick answer is no. the installer fails out. we have yet to try with xp mode though.

you are right. i typed out my process wrong. i do it the same way you do. so you are saying i can use ghost with win 7? that is good to know. thnks

Thanks Gatt... The info definitely helps. I have a question about WDS, if you don't mind me asking. I'm not sure if WDS would suit my organization well. We are a school district with 14 sites where we have customized images. Typically we would just use a ghost boot flash drive to boot to the ghost client. our ghost cast server is just a laptop we carry to each location. we copy whatever image we need to the laptop and run the session from the site. this works because our sites are all on different vlans and our laptop can pick up an address via dhcp. is there a client that each computer boots to that we are going to image (like WinPE) or is it a network boot situation? i'll read up on, but i was just curious. thanks again stve

Hey guys, I have come here for help as I am bit lost as to what I am trying to do in our environment. Maybe if I explain what I do with Xp in our environment, you guys could offer a way to get what i need from Windows 7. For the past few years we have been deploying XP in this fashion. 1. build a laptop with XP from scratch. install drivers, software, etc. tweak local admin and remove extra accounts after testing. 2. use the sysprep utility to seal my image, generating a new SID, and running a mini-setup on boot. a. the mini-setup: installs plug and play devices to navigate through mini-setup, prompts for a computer name, has the product key already added, and joins our organizations domain based with an account we created just for such purposes. 3. using Ghost to capture the image and store it on a network share. We do not use any of Microsofts deployment tools so I am not really familiar with it. I am wondering how I can acheive these same objectives in my answer file with Windows 7. I have heard rumors that Ghost does not work with Windows 7. Is there another utlity I should use instead of Ghost. Thanks for any help you guys can give. STeve