MRGRIM Posted November 25, 2009 Share Posted November 25, 2009 I'm looking for some help setting up a PXE booting server on my home network (I’ll be looking at something for business at a later date but my home network is the tester) I’ve looked a FOG and WDS and have settled on WDS which I have up and running. I found a guide that took me through syspreping an XP system I have (Was a VM) and managed to run wdscapture.exe which uploaded the XP Image to the WDS server. I then PXE booted a laptop and applied the image (laptop has no CD drive – which is the main reason I’m looking to do this) however as you’d guess it blue screened during boot. What I need rather than applying an image is simply provide the base XP install files, does anyone know how to do this? I did try running wdscapture.exe just after an the installer had copied the files to the drive, however it doesn’t see the drive volume (something to do with registry settings that only get applied after a sysprep is run) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wh1t3 and n3rdy Posted November 25, 2009 Share Posted November 25, 2009 I haven't set one up but I will check our documentation at work tomorrow if I get a chance, we use it to do rebuilds on all of our machines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MRGRIM Posted November 25, 2009 Author Share Posted November 25, 2009 Yeah I can see how it works (if I had a bunch of same/similar hardware) ... my problem is applying the image to different hardware - ideally I just want to apply an "install" image :) Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted November 25, 2009 Share Posted November 25, 2009 Build your images using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, do what you need to, then sysprep. I have over 500 machines built this way and deployed with WDS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted November 25, 2009 Share Posted November 25, 2009 Can't you boot off a cdrom over the network as well with PXE? That way you could get the basic drivers and hardware setup to get online for the rest. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted November 25, 2009 Share Posted November 25, 2009 It doesn't work like that. You need to install the drivers for the hardware in the WinPE2 image to support things like NICs (WinPE2 is the same generation as Vista/2008), and then slipsteam the drives into the XP install. Most hardware is supported by WinPE2, so often you do not have to do this step, but XP is crap when it comes to hardware support and you need to use MDT to add the drivers for the hardware. This then creates a WinPE image which can be used for a universal install image, at which point I capture a specific hardware image and use WDS to deploy this image to particular hardware. To clarrify: The WinPE2 image called Deploy (which is based on you Vista/2008 disk) needs drivers to support hardware not supported in Vista/2008, which are few an far between. This is used to deploy captured images. The image called Litestep (created by MDT) contains all your XP drivers, and is a universal installer for XP. With Vista, 2008, W7 and 2008 R2 you can create an image with MDT, capture it, and customize it during deployment, adding drivers and applications as part of the install, but this is limited with XP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MRGRIM Posted November 27, 2009 Author Share Posted November 27, 2009 I ended up following this guide http://winner.windowsdream.com/ and I now have XP installed :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted November 27, 2009 Share Posted November 27, 2009 I ended up following this guide http://winner.windowsdream.com/ and I now have XP installed :D Thats a good link to have, added to my favs in the event I need to do this myself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RogueSpear Posted December 25, 2009 Share Posted December 25, 2009 I ended up following this guide http://winner.windowsdream.com/ and I now have XP installed :D If you're interested in using RIS, I also wrote a program a AutoImage that takes a stock Microsoft RIS image and tweaks it quite a bit. While I've stopped developing it, it is GPL with source. I still use it to this day for RIS deployments and for making custom install discs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted April 18, 2010 Share Posted April 18, 2010 (edited) I ended up following this guide http://winner.windowsdream.com/ and I now have XP installed :D Have a look at this URL, that's what my company uses for reimaging their computers. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/u...on-manager.aspx Edited April 18, 2010 by Infiltrator Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joeypesci Posted May 16, 2010 Share Posted May 16, 2010 We used MDT 2010 at work. And I think with that solution a business can set it up for free. So if you IT department is limited then you could have a free setup. What I mean is, with WDS I believe you need a server which would be an extra licence. Where as with MDT 2010, you can just use a share on an XP box. You'll only be able to image 10 machines at a time with XP's limited connections but it would all then be free. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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