Silly beginners question - Fresh install of an OS from ISO
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Hi,
Sorry if my question is a little stupid and obvious but first a little background info:
I have read guides on FOG and what it can do, I have completed the leg work and got an Ubuntu install on a desktop and FOG up and running ready to receive images. The dept I work in is always needing to rebuild desktop PC’s for very specific uses and at present we are always having to install our OS’ from scratch via a disk, then input all the patches, edit the registry, install propriety drivers etc. We operate this outside our normal IT dept because our needs are so specific and their deployment methods have always caused issues in the past.
As a result I have been asked to create a new solution and I think FOG may be the way to go. As mentioned the basic set-up is complete and I am ready to go back to work on Monday and start making hardware independent images on a few spare PC’s that we have. However it has occurred to me that we will still have the rare occasion where it is necessary to do a fresh install from a Win7 disc.
[I]So rather than keep a physical copy of the discs for these rare occasions, I want to know if it is possible to create an ISO of the install disk, upload that to FOG and PXE boot a PC to it and run a standard attended install?[/I]
We do of course have the required license from MS to do this.
The reason I ask is that another dept in my work use a system called RackMonkey and a deployment server to do fresh installs of Server OS’s such as Win2K8 R2 etc. It can also send a hardware independent image if necessary We cannot use this system as it’s a little OTT for our needs and it’s on another site.
I have tried researching this question but I do suffer from learning difficulties and sometimes I find the answer difficult to extract from walls of text. I am happy to experiment and try it out myself on Monday but I just wanted to know if anyone has had experience with this as it could save me some time.
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The windows 7 CD is nothing more than a boot disk and an image file. It restores the image file install.wim which is in the sources folder of the CD.
You could just upload a vanilla image of windows 7 to FOG and restore that.
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For a fresh install I would recommend using a sysprep image maintained in a virtual machine.
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/windows-7-deployment-fog-sad2-driver-tool.380/[/url] has a good guide in creating a syspreped image. -
you may be able to use this info in the advanced boot menu to install over the network.
[url]http://ipxe.org/howto/winpe[/url] -
Thanks for the suggestions
I have plenty to be working on now on Monday.
