Windows 7 image for many different hardware, good guide in 2017 ?

[Jonathan Cool]

Hi everybody,
I want to create my first “golden” image for FOG with different hardware : HP8000, DeLL 7010, DeLL 3020, HP2530 …
After a Google search, i found this tutoriel :
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Create_a_windows_7_image_for_many_different_hardware

But, in 2017, it’s still works ?

If the answer is “Yes”, can i do this tutorial with VirutualBOX (free version) instead of VMWare ?

Many thanks
Have a nice day.

[Quazz]

I create all my images in Virtualbox, so yes it’s possible.

I don’t recommend creating an unnecessarily large hard drive. Try and figure out how much you’ll need.

That guide should work, although I personally do things a bit differently in certain parts (such as I don’t use unattend files), but this will depend on your environment.

There are better ways for handling drivers though. If you have inf based drivers you can place them in a folder in Windows\inf and windows will install them automatically. Of course, for a golden image this would be an enormous folder, which is why a lot of people use Postdownloadscripts to install their drivers.

[george1421]

We do this for both Win7 and Win10. We have a single universal image for all different models of computers we use on our campus. These are all Dell systems but the process would work for other hardware platforms as long as you can get the drivers for the models in inf format and not as a self extracting archive.

The key is to make your reference image on a virtual machine (I use vmware) with the mimimal number of drivers, sysprep and capture that image with FOG. That becomes your golden/master/mother image. We use MDT to create that reference image so it is consistently built every time since we update our reference image every quarter with the latest OS and application updates. MDT helps us do this so that it is repeatable each time.

Then during image deployment to the target computers we use fog’s post install script function to write a custom post install script that determines the target computer’s hardware model and then we inject the proper drivers into the target system before the target computer boots into OOBE.

There are a few discussion/tutorials on this subject.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/8889/fog-post-install-script-for-win-driver-injection
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/4278/utilizing-postscripts-rename-joindomain-drivers-snapins
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7740/the-magical-mystical-fog-post-download-script
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7391/deploying-a-single-golden-image-to-different-hardware-with-fog

In our environment we use the sysprep / unattend.xml file to name the computer, connect it to the domain instead of the fog client. We have some deployment time unique settings that our post install scripts inject into the unattend.xml file that’s not possible to do with the fog client so that method works out best for us.

[Jonathan Cool]

Many thanks for your reply.
I think, for the beginning, i will try the Quazz’s advice.

I will post my experience in this topic later …