How to make a multi hardware image

[Varadin]

Hi guys and girls! this is my first serious post in there but I want to share my knowlage of a multi hardware auto installables drivers

1 you need to build your image as you want softwares, and updates personally I sugest to use vmware

2 find all nic drivers yu need for all the computers you hav to deploy and put them into c:\drivers of your image

3 use a microsoft tool called DPinstall
[url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff544842(v=vs.85).aspx[/url]
[URL=‘http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff544842(v=vs.85).aspx’]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff544775(v=vs.85).aspx[/URL]

3 call dpinst into your boot script for installing your nic driver

4 mount a samba share with net use (on your fog server for my set-up)
5 recall dpinst.exe into that location for installing your drivers specificly for your pc

voila ! you have an image driver indenpendent how can manage all hardware

for specific desktop you may use a nic how you already have the drivers into your image and just plug-in it for pulling out of your samba server your computers drivers

volia if you need more specifications of my technique feel free to ask!

[Tom Elliott]

I can add to this but its more if you know all the drivers your systems use. You can actually integrate one image with all drivers included into the base image and blast all systems under your control with the same image. Save a lot of time. I’ll post more tomorrow when I can access my script.

[Varadin]

Hi Tom your solution is good in theory. if you manage a huge computer park it is far most easy to keep in hand one usb nic and one pci nic and upload the driver then manage a 120 go windows image … and this technique permit to add driver on the fly into your repository, upgrade them easily or remove them if they are not need anymore

[Lee Rowlett]

I do something very similar to the original post but instead of the post script fog (customised init.gz) detects the model, makes the reg changes to the images and the downloads the driver folder from the server (just after it completes the image task - before it reboots) and lets sysprep take care of the rest… never fails either!

[Tom Elliott]

[quote=“Varadin, post: 15621, member: 14268”]Hi Tom your solution is good in theory. if you manage a huge computer park it is far most easy to keep in hand one usb nic and one pci nic and upload the driver then manage a 120 go windows image … and this technique permit to add driver on the fly into your repository, upgrade them easily or remove them if they are not need anymore[/quote]

I understand what you’re saying and agree to a point. I work for a school district so every year we bid for the system we need to replace others. Because of this, we actually only maintain 6 different systems. Our images, with all drivers of all systems included with all software for the base is only 20GB. So for us, it’s just easier to build the image with the drivers embedded.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

[Jaymes Driver]

I agree Tom, I use a similar method as what you have described. But I as well work in a school corporation and we only keep about 5 - 6 models on hand, and normally share drivers. Since we use the same company, it normally just involves dropping in the new driver, sysprepping and pushing out the new image.

I would be interested in looking at your scripts and information to see how I can streamline my processes a little better.

But on the same note, a colleague of mine uses the same process as Lee has described,

[Tom Elliott]

I wasn’t feeling too well today, so I was not at work, but I’ll try to get something here tomorrow.

[Jaymes Driver]

No rush, my teachers are busy teaching again so I can go back to playing and learning. Windows 7 got thrown on me last minute last year, so this year I want to take some time to prepare and work the bugs out; I learned to sysprep and all that jazz, now I need to streamline and fix some hiccups.

[Tom Elliott]

We have a network share that we just placed all the drivers, but this could easily be changed to be right on the

@echo off
net use z: \<location of drivers> <ADPASSWORD> /user:<ADUSERNAME>
for /r z:\ %%i in (*.inf) do pnputil -a %%i
net use /del z:

Thanks,

[Jaymes Driver]

Ahh yes, another Active Directory environment.

I’ve been talking with our technology director, and I have him almost convinced that an Active Directory environment would be good for us.

Any experience with a Novell Network? I haven’t been able to get anything to path on my Novell network without first logging on, and if there are no NIC drivers, there is no log on. If there is no log on, there is no access. Are there similar ways to connect to content via the command line? Ideas?

[Tom Elliott]

net use z: \<location of drivers> <ADPASSWORD> /user:<ADUSERNAME>

This is for a Hardware (mostly) independent image. So theorethically, you would just create a VM. It’s network drivers should work with any Windows.

Change the ADPASSWORD and ADUSERNAME info out for your novell stuff.

This script is run before the image is uploaded. So basically, the image comes prepackaged with all the needed drivers.

[Jaymes Driver]

I’ll give it a shot! I normally use a virutal image and install the novell client before I push the image, there is just one specific model that has a hiccup with the NIC drivers. I’ll let you know what I figure out with the scripts.

Not trying to be lazy, I know that Novell and AD are both LDAP network I just didn’t know if the commands transposed

[Tom Elliott]

Windows commands always do. Good thing for SAMBA.

[Jaymes Driver]

Awesome, I got a form of it working. However if I don’t have the Novell client installed on the computer, it will not map the drive. It tries, it just never succeeds. This should more than work for my student and staff images. Thanks a bunch!

I would just like to figure out how to map the drive without installing the Novell client, but that isn’t your problem