Going Crazy usine Sysprep

[Guest]

Hello Everyone. Ok first off I want to point out that whatever confidence I
once had while I was in school is Dead. In Real LIfe situation, when things
go bad, they GO BAD.

In the departments that we support we have a very heterogeneous mix of
computers. At last count, I think it was around 4 dozen different types. I
am going crazy over here trying to use Sysprep for these machines. Now after
about a week of failure, I have an idea of what might be going wrong but I
can't get my head to take the 'fuzzyness' away from the solution right in
front of me. So now I have been trying to find a way to stop XP( oh sorry by
the way XP Pro Service Pack 2 Slipstreamed ) from loading the drivers for
whatever specific board I happen to be creating my 'Master Image that is
supposed to save me time'. Im guessing if I can let XP load generic drivers
for IDE Controllers,ACPI,....etc Mobo and CPU.....then I can go ahead and my
the image....and then proceed with the other machines.....with the result
being success with each machine eventually installing without me wanting to
quit and go find a job testing video games...like I planned to when I was 8
years old. If you want to mail me any advice, mail it to the following
YAHOO.COM account: danilo05@yahoo_nospam.com

 

[george]

I hate to burst your bubble, but AFAIK the sysprep solution is a solution
that takes a prepared system image and basically performs a binary copy of
that image onto the target machine.
Maybe you can see, that taking a binary image and putting on a machine also
means, that the target machine had better be 'consistent' with whatever is
in the image or otherwise you're in for some fun. (not)
Also, the sysprep solution runs a mini-setup (as you know) to detect some
PnP devices that might be in the target machine and fall within the scope of
devices supported with the drivers already 'on board' in the image.
If ever you want to get this to work, you'll need (at the very least) take
your master machine and after install, manually make sure you have 'generic'
drivers in that machine, before you take the image. And then still I'm not
all that confident it will work on your targets.

Maybe using unattended Remote Installation Service (RIS) is the better road
to go.
This will take your slipstreamed XP source files from a network share on a
RIS server (windows 2000 or 2003) and perform an over-the-network,
unattended installation onto the target machine, thus exactly installing
whatever is needed in the target machine, and not 'generic' stuff that might
not be all that performant.

Granted, this will take some setting up (and testing) too, but by design
this is the route to go when dealing with (very) dissimilar target machines.

just my thoughts

george