Windows 7 Deployment FOG- SAD2 Driver tool
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[quote=“Gilgamesh1082, post: 4366, member: 404”]Alrighty. I’ve been beating my head against this for the last 4 days now. I’ve created my VM in VirtualBox, verified that its using IDE instead of SATA and have created and recreated my Win7 image 5 separate times now thinking that I’ve just messed something up. The image works flawlessly on my VM. It uploads just fine. It downloads to an Optiplex 390 just fine. But when I boot the machine, it simply states Missing Operating System.
I’ve created a Win7 image with just one partition. The 100MB partition, I get rid of when initially installing. The only things I’ve installed on the image itself are updates and Office 2010. That’s it. Any suggestions out there?[/quote]
I suppose the two differences I see there are;
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you are deleting the 100mb partition, I left it there are there is really no reason to delete it and
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you are using virtual box instead of Vmware tools.
I doubt it is the second (vmware tools) that is the problem, more likely its the removal of the 100mb partition. Try leaving it there and checking if this works. Then try using vmware tools after that. It’s free for 30 days with vmware workstation 8.
Also make sure the dell optiplex has fully up to date bios. Can you try to deploy it to another PC? How about another vitual PC?
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Alrighty. Went back and redid it again. This time, I image to the 390 and it goes through Sysprep. Now my problem is that it hangs on Setup is checking video performance. It does this on multiple machines and on my VM. Any suggestions?
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And one last thing. Is there anyway under the sun for me to be able to use the Single Partition (Resizeable) option? We have a multitude of machines in our district. Having to constantly resize them once we’ve imaged them would be a colossal PITA.
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[quote=“Gilgamesh1082, post: 4400, member: 404”]Alrighty. Went back and redid it again. This time, I image to the 390 and it goes through Sysprep. Now my problem is that it hangs on Setup is checking video performance. It does this on multiple machines and on my VM. Any suggestions?[/quote]
What virtual software are you using to create it? Vmware or something else?
[quote=“Gilgamesh1082, post: 4405, member: 404”]And one last thing. Is there anyway under the sun for me to be able to use the Single Partition (Resizeable) option? We have a multitude of machines in our district. Having to constantly resize them once we’ve imaged them would be a colossal PITA.[/quote]
Fog actually still resizes the images in the process I have laid out. Basically, it only uploads as much data as their is on the original image, ie, if there is a 60gb hard drive, but my SOE only takes up 13gb, then that’s all it uploads. Then, when deploying to a physical machine, Fog will resize the partition to suite. So if it is a 250gb hard drive, fog will repartition the c drive to 250 from 13.
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I’m using VirtualBox, latest version with the extension pack loaded so I can PXE boot. I couldn’t get the image to deploy at all when using the single partition. I tried the multiple partition on the last attempt and it actually deployed, its just stuck at the WinSAT checking your video settings part of the sysprep.
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[quote=“Gilgamesh1082, post: 4602, member: 404”]I’m using VirtualBox, latest version with the extension pack loaded so I can PXE boot. I couldn’t get the image to deploy at all when using the single partition. I tried the multiple partition on the last attempt and it actually deployed, its just stuck at the WinSAT checking your video settings part of the sysprep. :([/quote]
If you cant figure it out, then I would suggest using VMware workstation as I outline in the guide, because it has been proven working with Vmware. It’s got a free 30 day full featured trial, so give it a go. Single partition should work, or multiple, just make sure it’s IDE and not SCSI.
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[COLOR=#000000]Actually, figured it out. Just a heads up, if anyone gets caught on that screen that says Checking system for video performance, restore your last snapshot. As per Rumbo over at MSFN,[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000][FONT=tahoma]“My advice is to run the System Assesment Test manually (WinSAT.exe dwm) or from the GUI (click Start, type [/FONT][I][FONT=tahoma][COLOR=#5d5d5d]performance[/COLOR][/FONT][/I][FONT=tahoma], click on [/FONT][B][FONT=tahoma][COLOR=#5d5d5d]Performance Information and Tools[/COLOR][/FONT][/B][FONT=tahoma], and run the assessment), rename the resulting xml in c:\windows\performance\winsat\datastore\ (it will have DWM as part of the name) changing whatever is in parentheses on the name to Prepop. For example: 2012-04-26-13.45.043.### DWM.Assesment ([/FONT][B][FONT=tahoma][COLOR=#5d5d5d]First assessment[/COLOR][/FONT][/B][FONT=tahoma]).WinSAT.xml will need to be renamed as 2012-04-26-13.45.043.### DWM.Assesment ([/FONT][B][FONT=tahoma][COLOR=#5d5d5d]Prepop[/COLOR][/FONT][/B][FONT=tahoma]).WinSAT.xml.”[/FONT][/COLOR]
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Hi - this is a great tutorial. Thanks for sharing.
I seem to have got through everything fine except for the sysprep part. After I run sysprep and then restart the VM it will not PXE boot. Can anyone please help as I am due to deploy Windows 7 to nearly 500 clients next week.
cheers
Ed
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[quote=“ejefferson, post: 4927, member: 1539”]
I seem to have got through everything fine except for the sysprep part. After I run sysprep and then restart the VM it will not PXE boot. Can anyone please help as I am due to deploy Windows 7 to nearly 500 clients next week.
[/quote]Hi!
Try:
If you’re using VMware Workstation you have to press F12 to boot over a network.
If you’re using VirtualBox you must change the type of processing to PIXX4 (or 3). is a network card from AMD, I think.Waiting feedback
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[quote=“danuel, post: 4939, member: 628”]Hi!
Try:
If you’re using VMware Workstation you have to press F12 to boot over a network.
If you’re using VirtualBox you must change the type of processing to PIXX4 (or 3). is a network card from AMD, I think.Waiting feedback :)[/quote]
Hi Danuel
I have tried the F12. When I go back to earlier snapshots on VM Workstation PXE boot works. I am going to have to backtrack I reckon.
There was one problem that I encountered before I tried to take the image. The part where we had to adjust the hostnamechanger. I got the two required files into a zipped file. Named the zip file FogService.zip. When I tried to overwrite this zip file on the FOG server (ubuntu) I got a permissions error saying that I could not overwrite the file. I wasn’t sure on how to proceeed at this stage so I tried to go ahead and create the image.
Can you advise further?
Ed
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Please, check if you execute the [COLOR=#0000ff][URL=‘http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/windows-7-deployment-fog-sad2-driver-tool.380/#post-1639’][COLOR=#0000ff][B]STEP 9[/B][/COLOR][/URL][/COLOR]correctly.
I think you don’t need modify zip files on server. I don’t change and works good.
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Everything seemed to go well for me until I imaged the new machine. Windows 7 x64 started OK, but then asked me for languages, time zones, a user name, and a key even though I had selected these in my unattend.xml. Then it didn’t join the domain even though I selected the domain and credentials in FOG. Finally, I couldn’t sign in as machine or domain administrator as they are disabled.
Any ideas where I might have gone wrong?
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[quote=“Tony Cimello, post: 5276, member: 1669”]Everything seemed to go well for me until I imaged the new machine. Windows 7 x64 started OK, but then asked me for languages, time zones, a user name, and a key even though I had selected these in my unattend.xml. Then it didn’t join the domain even though I selected the domain and credentials in FOG. Finally, I couldn’t sign in as machine or domain administrator as they are disabled.
Any ideas where I might have gone wrong?[/quote]
Sounds like a problem with your xml file and your sysprep. I would strongly suggest to scrap your image, and rebuild from scratch, following each step very closely. If there’s something you don’t understand then post in this thread. You will probably have to try a few times to get the sysprep/unattend file correct. But if you follow my guide it will work.
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I get to image and get stalls when applying the image. And, I have it it coming up “missing operating system”. All on the assumption I’m doing this correct with .32 and the latest kernel - and on VirtualBox w/ addon’s (for PXE concerns). I can image all day long, upload successful, but the drop is a pain…
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[quote=“andyroo54, post: 5349, member: 267”]Sounds like a problem with your xml file and your sysprep. I would strongly suggest to scrap your image, and rebuild from scratch, following each step very closely. If there’s something you don’t understand then post in this thread. You will probably have to try a few times to get the sysprep/unattend file correct. But if you follow my guide it will work.[/quote]
I had a few issues:
- I didn’t encrypt my AD passwords using Fogcrypt.
- I ran across a problem where Sysprep would fail, due to me removing the Windows Media Center. This requires the manual disabling of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service. (I don’t know why, that’s just what punching in the error said to do, and it worked.)
- The whole section on changing the hostnamechange.dll threw me for a loop. First because I was looking for hostnamechanger.dll, and when I did figure out what I was looking for, started to panic about having to compile. In the end it looked as if you only have to compile if you want to change the default key-passphrase combo built into Fogcrypt.
The only thing that I still have a problem with is that when the system boots up to the desktop it uses the default one in addition to the nicely laid out administrator one I made, and used the default taskbar icons. In addition the system couldn’t detect some of the hardware on my new systems. Not a show stopper, but something I’ll have to figure out.
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Ok, I finally got mine working, scrapped the whole “gold image” build from VirtualBox. When I did it baremetal - it worked. However, I can’t tell if my SAD2 install worked with the drivers, since I have network, ide, etc but have a few with the notorious yellow question mark for (base, and something else) Not sure if there’s a pause in the script to allow something else to finish or what. I know it’s always a work in progress, so maybe once I’ve figured it all out - for good, I can draft a nice step by step with pretty pictures.
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[quote=“Leroy Brown, post: 5431, member: 1560”]Ok, I finally got mine working, scrapped the whole “gold image” build from VirtualBox. When I did it baremetal - it worked. However, I can’t tell if my SAD2 install worked with the drivers, since I have network, ide, etc but have a few with the notorious yellow question mark for (base, and something else) Not sure if there’s a pause in the script to allow something else to finish or what. I know it’s always a work in progress, so maybe once I’ve figured it all out - for good, I can draft a nice step by step with pretty pictures.[/quote]
I’d suggest to test the SAD tool by itself first, by installing win 7 vanilla on some hardware, then manually running the sad tool. This is how I got it to work initially… but if you get the same version I used and use the scripts I uploaded then it should work.
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Has anyone been able to successfully build a “gold” image on VirtualBox then lay it on a baremetal machine? I can create successfully from a machine, to Fog, and back down, but from VB up and then down to baremetal doesn’t work. I did make sure its set to IDE.
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[quote=“Leroy Brown, post: 5551, member: 1560”]Has anyone been able to successfully build a “gold” image on VirtualBox then lay it on a baremetal machine? I can create successfully from a machine, to Fog, and back down, but from VB up and then down to baremetal doesn’t work. I did make sure its set to IDE.[/quote]
yeah I build a ‘master/gold’ image in Virtualbox, I’m not the only one either
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okay so you can upload but not deploy.
once you have sysprepped your Gold Vbox and uploaded it. just turn on the Virtual machine and let it run through sysprep see if that works.
p.s. don’t forget to take a snapshot before sysprep
