Hi... Newbie to Fog (last year anyway)

[Bill Rice]

Started working with fog back in 2009, and since then the company I work for has found numerous uses for the PXE, we have heavily modified it to work with loading iso images for live enviroments and such other utilities… Hirens being one of our biggest and most heavily used.,
That being said, we use it for deploying out windows XP systems and backing up “A” team members pc’s from time to time… Now we get into Windows 7! and thats when it all fell apart. we are mandated to use a IBM Lenovo and utilize the base package installed on said lenovo (OEM Image) and deploy the pc’s. I am tasked with deploying this first run of 50, I was able to image a box We will call it (Master Image) to the server and then bring it back. Also adding it with no issue to the domain. made some changes to it and upload a modified image and bring it back down to test, Everything works Exactly as it should…

Now we get into the tricky part, I uploaded the mac and Names of the remaining 49 PC (which BTW is the first 50 PC batch of atleast 250 or more new pc’s) and that went perfect. so i go to upload an image via multicast to 2 random boxes that were parts of a default group within Fog… then auto booted and loaded the image. at the end of the image process, however is where all the problems started… I get that dam Blinking cursor… thats it…
I did use fogprep prior to uploading the image also selected the multi partition single disk non resisable image format since every box were getting is 250GIG and all IDENTICAL… both of the new pc’s i imaged got the blinking cursor… the master pc images fine with NO Problems… they have not been joined to the doimain either… I understand SysPrep is NOT required… Also upon further investigation find that there are 3 partitions, and after the image takes place Fog makes Partition 0 the “C” Drive and ACTIVE… this is NOT the OS Partition… I have gone in and changed the active partition to the OS Partition, and used win7 boot cd to repair the Bootsec with the command " bootsect /nt60 (with the /ALL and without the /ALL) " this yeilded no progress… I am even trying to do a DD copy which will take a while im sure… Im at a loss as to what the correct step to image theses win 7 machines would be… Do we need to use Fogprep only, and if not then what ? DO I REALLY HAVE TO USE SYSPREP??? I would prefer not to as i find it complicated and dont want to manually add a Software Key for every workstation… these machines should auto validate based on the Current SLIC key in the bios tables.

Enough ranting and sorry for the long post… Buy please if anyone has anything to offer please let me know as im terribly lost with this win 7 image process. You all have a great day and Keep up the good work… Hope to see Version .33 Very soon and hope even more that better Win7 Support be incorperated into it…

[chad-bisd]

Please clarify. It works when you unicate upload/download, but not when you multicast?