hmmm, i will give a try to your proposition as soon as possible. Thanks for the trick christopher 🙂

You create three separate winnt.sif files for each of the PC’s and feed them into each deployment. They need to be copied to the image before the MININT setup after sysprep.

[quote=“Alan Reeves, post: 11442, member: 3679”]Hi,
I am brand new to FOG. I have installed a test system under Ubuntu 10.04, uploaded an XP SP3 image and successfully deployed to three machines. FOG looks superb, thanks and well done to all who have contributed.
I have a question about regular, unattended deployment to multiple machines.

First, some background. I am a volunteer IT administrator for an independent school in the UK. I’m retired now, but in my professional career I was an IBM mainframe systems and assenbler programmer. That is by way of explaining that my knowlege of the Linux and pc world is limited (but I can learn quickly!).

The school has about 25 Dell pc’s, running XP PRO SP3. These are all second-hand, donated from businesses, so all the machines have unique product licences and COA stickers (ie there’s no Volume Licence key). Up to now I have been manually deploying a single image from a master machine, by removing the hard drives and cloning them (with Clonezilla and other tools). This is hard work but generally I don’t have problems, as the machines are identical. However, occasionally I have been prompted to re-active the XP licence, and I don’t really understand the circumstances in which this happens I’m looking to using FOG to do regular network deployments.

Now, my question. Everything I have read makes me understand that I should use SYSPREP to prepare my common image. But, if I understand correctly, I can only set a single product licence in Sysprep? I want to achieve completely unattended deployment, so don’t want the deployed systems prompting for licence activation - or, if it does, I want some automated way of replying to the prompts with the correct (unique) licence key (side question - could I use “AutoIt” for this?).

It might help to know that I am not using a domain controller, the pc’s are simply in a workgroup, with a login script to map to a shared NAS drive for student folder access.

Thanks for bearing with me. I hope I have correctly explained the issue I have, and thanks in advance for your assistance.

Regards
Alan Reeves[/quote]

[quote=“BryceZ, post: 11482, member: 2”]Off the top of my head, it sounds like a bad hard drive; could be either server or host.

Are you pushing these images from the same server? Are they going to the same host? Were there any problems with uploading the Windows 7 image?[/quote]

This, the drive will eventually go. Could be the disk, the cable. Reseat everything on the motherboard and give it a shot again. otherwise force Full duplex on your router and double check the onboard nic is also set to full duplex.

Take out the wireless card and try it again. It’s fighting with the video card for IRQ assignment. I had the same issue with getting Ubuntu 12.04 on a midrange model of Acer.

[quote=“tlongfog, post: 4047, member: 1305”]
[FONT=Tahoma]Hey guys,[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]I just started using Fog today and am trying to upload my first image.[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]The Dell box is a OptiPlex 780 running Windows 7 64bit.[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma]It has a ATI Radeon HD 3450 Graphics Card and a Intel 82567LM-3 Gigabit NIC.[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]I have it booting via PXE and am able to select “Preform Full Host Registration and Inventory” from the Fog menu.[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma]I have installed the Fog Service and have completed the FogPrep.[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]After the Host Inventory starts I get the following errors…[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][3.884261] tps65818L no chip?[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.262476] acpiphp_ibm: ibm_acpiphp_init: acpi_walk_namespace failed[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.262856] Could not find Carillo ranch MCH device.[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.263894] uvesafb: failed to execute /sbin/v86d[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.263121] uvesafb: make sure that the v86d helper is installed and executable[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.263158] uvesafb: Getting VBE info block failed (eax=8x4f88, err=-2)[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma][4.263178] uvesafb: vbe_init() failed with -22[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]This screen will display for about 3 minutes and then I get a screen of black and white lines like static.[/FONT]
[FONT=Tahoma](I have attached two screen shots)[/FONT]

[FONT=Tahoma]I did complete a successful upload and deploy on an older Dell GX280 that worked perfectly.[/FONT]

I would assume this has something to do with the graphics card in the 780. I have about 90 of these boxes to reimage and would love to start using Fog.

Thanks guys.

[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman][COLOR=#000000] [ATTACH=full]126[/ATTACH] [/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[ATTACH=full]127[/ATTACH][/quote]

[quote=“Kilpady, post: 10226, member: 3216”]Hello All, just became a member, can someone kindly advise how I may image a laptop(Acer table W510) with Windows 8 - 32 bit.

Many thanks[/quote]
You don’t.

Driver support is nearly zero for 32bit Windows 8.

[quote=“Steve Ropiak, post: 11276, member: 47”]If I run sysprep with an unattend.xml that does everything except name the computer (it prompts for that), when exactly does this script run? Is it after the mini setup is totally done? I’d like to populate this with my little powershell script that joins the domain, sets a password and activates the real administrator account, etc. Basically what I need to know if this is the last thing to execute. Thanks to all who reply.[/quote]

The stages for Windows deployment/installs can be found here:

[url]http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/[/url]

Not much has changed really in the timing of when things happen. As far as the last thing that runs, that is the RunOnceEx.cmd. It will launch anything under the system account. It still works for Vista, 7 and 8 as I’ve used it for remote users that are on dial up to send an all in one distribution with slip streamed patches and applications.

For bare metal maintain a list somewhere that a net command can fetch a name from (csv, txt), can’t find the script in the pile I have right now, but this should get you headed in the right direction. It still works for Vista and 7 incidentally. I haven’t tested it for 8 because the places I contract to are seriously looking at Ubuntu with WINE because…well, just look at 8. It’s pretty awful.

Otherwise, munge the vbscript as much as you like and it will be the LAST item on the RunOnceEx.cmd because it requires a reboot.

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]'Changing computer name for WNT/W2k/WXP with script:[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]sNewName = “put new name here”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]Set oShell = CreateObject (“WSCript.shell”)[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]sCCS = “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]sTcpipParamsRegPath = sCCS & “Services\Tcpip\Parameters”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]sCompNameRegPath = sCCS & “Control\ComputerName”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]With oShell[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegDelete sTcpipParamsRegPath & “Hostname”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegDelete sTcpipParamsRegPath & “NV Hostname”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegWrite sCompNameRegPath & “ComputerName\ComputerName”, sNewName[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegWrite sCompNameRegPath & “ActiveComputerName\ComputerName”, sNewName[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegWrite sTcpipParamsRegPath & “Hostname”, sNewName[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14].RegWrite sTcpipParamsRegPath & “NV Hostname”, sNewName[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]End With ’ oShell[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#070f14]MsgBox “Computer name changed, please reboot your computer”[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

If doing an in place migration of MS OS products:

What you should be asking is how do I backup meaningful data before wiping the box?

The OS and apps are one thing, but end users usually are more than a little annoyed when all their stuff is gone. Read up on USMT (User state migration tool), for FOG I would use USMT v2.0 or lower as the initialization of the deployment process. Either by command line or using the automatic UI agent.

USMT is a pile of scripts made by microsoft that go hunting for user generated stuff (docs, pics, music, video) and put it somewhere else (attached storage/USB/NAS). Later versions use the MS certificates and are very painful to get working properly without Active Directory and a file share structure/SCCM available to manage it. So word to the wise, don’t count on any version of USMT to work outside of SCCM 2007 or 2013, even then WITH SCCM it is very painful to setup.

It is using the open source program, “partimag” (partimage . org) to create and store the image files.its a image file .img that it recovers duing the process but finally it sounds like dude sounds like me…wtf

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[quote=“FogUserXYZ, post: 11519, member: 3752”]Hello and thank you for reading.

I work IT in an office of 70 users, and use FOG to for imaging the office machines.

With one laptop, an HP Elitebook 2530p that I am trying to deploy a windows 7 image too (overwriting the current XP image) it goes through what appears to be a normal boot process, then gets to the blue screen where you would expect to see the image deploy status, but then it just says “changing hostname” then “success” then it reboots without actually deploying the image.

In Active tasks in FOG it shows the task as completed and over with, it is driving me nuts!

Here is a link to pictures I took of the stages of the process, hopefully somebody can identify what the mistake is from these.

[url]http://imgur.com/a/fBZCT[/url]

Thank you so much for reading![/quote]

I have experienced this before. Changing the FOG kernel to another version with support for the laptop in question solved my problem.

How to change your FOG kernel: [url]http://sysadministration.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/changing-the-kernel-fog-clients-use-for-pxe-boot/[/url]
List of FOG kernels and supported devices: [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=WorkingDevices[/url]

I woking for a week at this issue, trying serveral kernel configuration with no result.
Does anybody using a kernel for deploying on Raid 1 or 5? It would be wonderful if someone can share his kernel.

For anyone with my problem described - it was due to me spelling kernel improperly… I had kernal chain.c32 instead of kernel chain.c32… live and learn. 🙂

I ran check disc, have decided that this is a bad hard drive, the scan did fix some bad sectors but the image will still not upload, this HDD had problems when it came into my office, so I am trying to pull of a fresh reformat with windows 7 and it is still stopping at one spot. Thanks for you help!

It makes no sense to measure WDS virtually, because the virtual machines got ready at different times. That’s because multicast process deploys and the installation takes part “offline” so it is not like fog, that all machines get ready at the same time with multicast. Tomorrow i can test multicast performance but only with an 100 MBit switch.
For sure it can be said fog is quicker with 1 Gbit both in backup and deployment.

yeah or just make it a yearly thing that I update 3 times then re do them staggered ??? not so bad I suppose

Also you could try to specify some settings in your unattend.xml sysprep answer file:

<PersistAllDeviceInstalls>true</PersistAllDeviceInstalls>
<DoNotCleanUpNonPresentDevices>true</DoNotCleanUpNonPresentDevices>

fini 🙂

I think you can install windows 7 and customize the partition to be about 80gb, which is hopefully the smallest drive you’ll need to support. Do your customizations and sysprep it with an unattend option to resize the partition to fill the drive. Shutdown and take the image as single disk, multiple partition (it just works better).

When you deploy, depending on your sysprep options, it should fit onto any drive 80GB and over and auto expand the partition to fill the disk.

It’s more complex than this because of all the sysprep steps and making the unattend file, but I think this is the route you’ll want to take I think.

I do NOT use single partition resizable with Windows 7 because it may not work, and if it dies in the middle of resizing the partition, it makes it unusable.

I solved it by disabling the Stealth mode in with a registry tweak vi AD GPO: [URL=‘http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Troubleshooting_Host_Management_Showing_Hosts_as_Down#Windows_Vista.2F7_.28Windows_Firewall_with_Advanced_Security.29’]A[/URL]rticle [URL=‘http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Troubleshooting_Host_Management_Showing_Hosts_as_Down#Windows_Vista.2F7_.28Windows_Firewall_with_Advanced_Security.29’]HERE[/URL]

I went mad enabling / disabling firewall, logging packets, changing rules … That made it work. If you are not in an Active Directory, add the registry key, changing DomainProfile for PublicProfile, StandardProfile or PrivateProfile, depending of your needs.

I am wanting to deploy XP or Win 7 via Fog, but I would like the machine to pull the drivers from the server

What is the best option and is there any chance you can assist me on this

I can deploy images and join to the server but im kind of stuck with the driver side / updates

thanks

Lee