Ghost sysprep and pnp drivers

[Guest]

I am using ghost to deploy standard images across several offices with
diferent product keys and diferent hardware.

I have in the past used landesk and a facility within landesk to inject
files to a disk image, including a diferent sysprep.inf file between the
imaging of a client disk and the reboot to start the windows mini setup of a
sysprepped image.

What this allowed was the ability to maintain a folder of drivers outside of
the the disk image, so that if I needed to image a new model of PC I could
simply add the plug and play windows drivers files to a network share, and
modify a sysprep.inf to add any additional folders to the oempnpdriverspath=
statement.

This was great as the original image didn't need changing.

I am looking to try and do this within ghost just to inject files post ghost
imaging and update the sysprep.inf file.

Anyone any ideas?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

There are many ways to do keep drivers outside an image for easy update.
(because regular re-capturing (sysprep-sealing and cloning) isn't very
efficient)

You can do this with Ghost Explorer if you captured a FAT32 partition. (NTFS
is read-only). With FAT you can use oformat, cvtarea and convert to make it
a good NTFS system after deployment.

Altiris offers a utility with their solution called firm.exe to inject stuff
into an unbooted ntfs image.

But what we do is boot from a regularly updated WinPE (drvinst.exe with the
latest nic and mass-storage drivers) to copy files (inject) from a network
share to an offline deployed ntfs-image. We don't use oempnpdriverspath in
sysprep.inf at all, but we use setupcopyoeminf.exe (see MSFN board) to
integrate the detected drivers. You can do that after boot but before
mini-setup with a script-call in HKLM\system\setup\cmdline. The script must
start mini-setup at the end.

If you don't have WinPE (I really think Microsoft should release this freely
to the public and not only to OEMs!!!), then use BartPE, although he
legality of that is questionnable.

You only need an image with a compatible HAL and (if needed) the correct
massstorage drivers to boot correctly. And even those can be detected and
inserted after deployment but before first boot from WinPE. (use msdinst.exe
for mass-storage and the WinPE registry to detect HAL-type)

If you're looking for hundreds of drivers, the best assembled driverpacks
I've ever came across are BTS's on www.driverpacks.net

If you really want to take a look at how windows deployment is going to be
in a few years, you could use ximage.exe and drvload.exe from the Longhorn
beta1 WAIK (if you can get it). You can mount a wim-image with the wimfilter
and integrate servicepacks, hotfixes and drivers to the offline image. And
of course msi packages and the scripts that silently install them.

So there's some wonderful stuff from microsoft coming up, but the closest
"supported" thing to the future is to start using BDD 2.5 now.

(if some terms I mentioned above are new to you, please google them; there's
lots of info on it and there will be many more in the future)

Good luck!