Xp Universal Image an then some!

[John]

Hello Good people!

I have a question for you, how to create a Universal XP Ghost image. That
will work with any machine (no HAL problems) and with office,included in the
image.


Thank you for all replies!

 

[Missing Link]

Basically you can't. A ghost image will include the HAL for the system it was
created and different HALs require different system files. Also different
chipsets require different drivers. If the image is wrong all you get is
BSODs for "INNACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE" after the Ghost restore. You can get
away with it by using the lowest common denominator and use the UniProcessor
non-ACPI HAL and generic IDE interface but that will reduce performance and
go through detect hardware processes on boot

The only way round this is you must install Windows to get the right HAL
then chain the required drivers and applications. 1st research the .sif file
format to see how you incorporate drivers into a build and chain additional
applications. If you have access to the deployment tools on the server cd
there is a full document in the .sif (answer) file format.

As an alternative look at nLite, a freeware package that will help you
create a file specific to your needs. You then need to reburn the CD with the
winnt.sif file in the i386 directory along with drivers and applications.

 

[William Wood]

You can't have a universal image HAL wise with Windows XP. My trick is to
manually replace the HAL and rebuild the image. It's not recommended nor
supported, but it does the trick.

What I do is pick an architecture that I use as my primary HAL (In this
case, it's the 'ACPI Multiprocessor PC' HAL) and build my image from that. I
then save that image using ghost to my server, then load it on a machine
that uses a different HAL (In my case, it's the 'Advanced Configuration
Power Interface (ACPI) PC' HAL). After ghost has finished restoring it,
Windows will sit in an endless reboot cycle and just won't boot. I then boot
off the XP CD and open the recovery console and manually copy the HAL
required off the CD to the system drive. When I've done that, I boot into
safe mode which detects a bunch of new core components, restart when
prompted and Windows boots fine. I then upload the image back as a copy of
the master, but for that HAL.

This isn't supported by Microsoft though, and I only do it because the
number of machines we service with this HAL is not worth the effort to
manually build another version of the image for each revision.

You need to use the expand command in the recovery console to inflate the
required HAL to restore it. This doesn't always seem to work for some reason
through the recovery console, so I did it in Windows on to a floppy disk
that I use to just do a straight copy and paste.

expand D:\i386\halacpi.dl_ c:\WINDOWS\system32\hal.dll

Should expand the hal and replace the existing one in the system directory.
See the attached KB article for a list of all the HALs and their assemblies.
The compressed versions on the Windows CD all end in .dl_

HAL List KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309283/en-us