How to use unattended script to complete oobe without loading a new image

[rogerdodger]

Hi there!
Brand new to FOG and not sure if it can do what I want it to do - hopefully someone more knowledgeable can help me out.

We currently use Windows Configuration Designer to get through OOBE automatically and install our RMM agent on the PC which then runs the scripts to install software, etc.

We place the files on an SD card and after a few minutes, it’s all done.

Instead of manually inserting the SD card into each PC, we would like to use FOG (if possible) to do the same thing over the network so we would just need to connect a new PC and everything would finish automatically.

Can it be done and if so, how? Thanks in advance!

[george1421]

@rogerdodger Typically to would bake that into your golden image, so your deployment was all self contained.

But to your point answer me what is on that sd card? Do you boot off from the card or do you boot into windows and then run a batch file from the sd card?

There are a few options if its self bootable or you can make a winpe image that containes the files you need and then you can boot that from the fog server. SO you have a few options based on what you have on the sd card.

[rogerdodger]

@george1421 Thanks for the quick response.

We boot into Windows and then the files on the SD card that were created from Windows Configuration Designer takes care of OOBE.

Basically, I want to leave everything as is on the PC. I don’t want to reimage it. I just want to do exactly as we’re doing now but just do it over the network.

Can FOG do that and if so, how?

[george1421]

@rogerdodger I looked into Windows Configuration Designer since I dont use it. FOG is not the right tool here to use. This WCD creating a deployment package that windows oobe uses /installs from local media. So windows is running at that time, FOG can’t touch the system since its running linux. Unless you can access the wcd package files from a network share, you are stuck using a usb/sd card.

[JJ Fullmer]

@rogerdodger If all your SD card is doing is running ppkg files, those can be applied with powershell in a snapin, in some instances you can embed such in the image but usually best to do it after, during we’ll provisioning.

So you can probably make a simple snapin that uses powershell and the install-provisioningpackage command that references each ppkg file which you upload as the snapin file. There are some other ways you can go about it, it won’t work out of the box, but you can build a pretty robust automation solution with fog at the core.

You could also embed the ppkgs or a script that downloads the most up to date version from an internal source and have it as part of a setupcomplete.cmd or synchronous commands in an unattend xml

I’m on a phone at the moment, but if you want to go down this road I will gladly help you get started

[JJ Fullmer]

@rogerdodger wait, I just read this bit, not reimaging it makes it difficult. You still could use snapins and the fog client, but fully automating it would require reimaging.