Posts made by MichaelDigital

Thanks.
I am a big user of VMware, but before paying to upgrade to VMware workstation, I am trying out Virtualbox because of the snapshot feature. If Virtualbox works fine for me, then I will forgo Workstation for VB. Funny thing is, with VMware player, I can simply copy the folder of the VM to my external, plug it into my PC at work, and open the VM right up. With Virtualbox, I have had to “export appliance” to move my VM to my work machine. Is there an easier way to accomplish this or not really?

Another question, should I set the VDI to dynamically allocate space or select a Fixed Size?

Ah,
Thanks Jaymes. My setup was I have both my FOG and the os i am manipulating in vm’s on the same machine, and have both network adapters set to local host only. I have an external fog machine I will try and pull an image to. And thanks for the kernel I will try it!

Greetings all,

I’m playing around with virtualbox because i plan to build some new images for a few clients, and building them in a VM just seems to make sense. Problem I am having is, I can’t get FOG to register the host that is inside a VM on Virtualbox. Does anyone know what specs I should use to setup the OS ie VDI, VDMK, VHD. I try to register and it just blows right threw not allowing me to enter a single bit of info.

Thanks!

[quote=“Chris Sodey, post: 21062, member: 1418”]Tom,

I will try to test your kernel. I finished making my custom kernel and it is working.

[URL=‘https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=971575DDB836155F!175&authkey=!AFmNg5OiH-ViV00&ithint=file%2C’]https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=971575DDB836155F!175&authkey=!AFmNg5OiH-ViV00&ithint=file,[/URL][/quote]

I ran into this issue with some Dell 745 and 755 with ATI cards in them. This kernel worked for me as well. Thanks!

Very nice script!

Good news! There was nothing wrong with the script. It deleted the Drivers folder after they installed collect along with the unattend.xml. Thanks for everyone’s help! it wasn’t until I pushed the image to a different model PC that I noticed it worked correctly. The first one I was using as testing grounds, apparently is missing a driver. Thanks Again!

Thanks so much Tom. I’m going to try it now and will post the results.

ok. i’ve located this in the WSIM. But, what pass do I add this on? Also, because the sizes of the disks vary, inputting a specific size could prove bad. How do I configure this to tell sysprep in the unattend.xml file to just expand the partition to fill the drive no matter what the size?

[quote=“Raff, post: 13178, member: 298”]When you shrink the partitions on the 320GB disk, make sure the free space is at the end of the disk and not in the middle. I prefer using the gparted live CD ([url]http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php[/url]) rather than windows Disk Management to accomplish this

You can use the command <ExtendOSPartition> in your unattended.xml file to expand the volume to use the full disk during sysprep.[/quote]

I am looking for this option, but can’t seem to locate it. Anyone know how to use this? I am referring to the ExtendOSPartion in the unattend.xml file

Very interesting Lee,
Can you go into more detail on the process of this for everyone?

LOL Good thought. And, In the end of the script setupcomplete.cmd script put a wait or a pause command to make the computer wait. Gotta look up the commands. I’ll post my finished solution.

So,

Everything is working well, but I wanted to remove the driver pack from the machine’s after imaging them because they are almost 2 gigs. So, I wrote a script to remove the unattend.xml file and included to remove the drivers folder. Placed the script in c:\windows\setup\scripts\ folder so it will run automatically after computer finishes its setup.
Real basic, here is what it is -
@echo off
del /Q /F c:\windows\system32\sysprep\unattend.xml
del /Q /F c:\windows\panther\unattend.xml
rmdir c:\drives /Q /S

I think this is removing the Drivers directory before windows finishes the drivers install. Any better ideas on how I could accomplish this?

I just tried this. Man, this works great! Thanks for your help!

Hey Jaymes got another question for you.

I found all my drivers that I believe I need from Dell’s website for this Optiplex 755 (only one of many kinds) and I created a folder called “Drivers” on the root of C. I next edited the registry like you mentioned, adding the ; adding “C:\Drivers”. (without quotes) My question is, the drivers I downloaded are in zip format, so I simply extracted all the drivers into their sub directories under c:\Drivers. Is windows smart enough to search threw sub directories to find the correct info by just pointing it to c:\Drivers?

Very Awesome. Honestly, I think I like your way better. I’ll get this going. And thanks for the quick response!

What folder do you Jaymes put your drivers in for windows to automatically locate them?

Man this is awesome! Just what I needed! I was having some quarks with building in VMware so maybe this will help me iron the kinks out too. Thanks Jaymes!

Greetings everyone.

I just got a new job, and i’m tasked with managing dozens of hundreds of types of pc’s. Much more different than me managing just the 3 schools before. My question is, when building a base image, I want to be able to take that base image (that i fogged in audit mode) and insert specific drivers for the hardware that I will be deploying that on. Can anyone give me a few pointers or point me in the right direction as to how to do this? My goal is that once I FOG the new image to a machine, windows will search for drivers for hardware for that specific machine and locate them no problem. I hope I’m making myself understandable. Any help is much appreciated!!

[quote=“chad-bisd, post: 20978, member: 18”]With Windows 7 and Windows 8, it’s much easier to use Sysprep. I create images for each hardware platform as I have not yet figured out driverpacks. I have a sysprep answer file for Win7x32 and one for Win8x32, and a helper script that runs commands to copy my answer file and setupcomplete file, and to rearm Office 2010/2013 before running sysprep and shutting down the machine.

A high level overview of my procedure is:

1. Start Windows setup, go until it reboots and asks for a computer and user name
2. Hit ctrl+shift+f3 to restart in audit mode
3. load programs, update local group policy
4. shut down and take a pre-sysprep image, an “audit-mode” image
5. push the image I just made to a second machine to verify it works and comes up in audit mode
6. run my helper script that copies files, rearms office, and starts sysprep with the proper command line args.
7. upload this to a new image as the “oobe image” for this hardware.
8. set clients to use the oobe image and deploy

My FOG service is stopped and set to manual so it doesn’t try to rename/join domain while I’m loading software. My answer file has all the options setup so it doesn’t prompt for anything during the oobe prompt. My setupcomplete scripts activates windows and office either against KMS or against our AD (Active Directory Based Activation), sets the FOG server back to auto, starts the FOG service, and FOG then renames and joines the computer to the domain.

I have a checklist of software and settings that I can load for each platform depending on if it’s a student, teacher, or lab computer, and what campus it’s on. Since we use Deep Freeze to secure out student and lab computers (and some admins/teachers that like coupon printers and fake news websites) we cannot easily push out software after the machines leave the technology department.[/quote]

Chad,

At 3 of my schools I administer, I use Deep Freeze on all the Windows 7 machines. Updating and installing software has become so easy because of the remote console and all the features. Do you not use PStools in conjunction with Deep Freeze to deploy/update software?