20070918

Things I haven't yet forgotten about WDS and XP

1. Blank your destination drive
2. ImageX needs to be told to use the SIS rwm file
3. Make lots of incremental images, who knows when Sysprep will decide to screw everything up
4. If you don't have the Vista DVD you have to use the CLI to deploy
5. Something about drivers? You need to create a structure for them, the built in stuff doesn't work, I forgot the details.
6. Most of the docs are for Vista and fail to mention this stuff
7. Don't set an admin password whilst testing, especially in Sysprep.ini
8. There's no multicasting until Windows 2008
9. I capture with the capture image, if you can't select drive C you've not sysprep'd, you need to save the image to a drive, drive you're imaging will do if there's room, and connect to the server. Don't forget to delete the image that's left on the drive.

To deploy I boot to the Generic WinPE image then:
net use m: \\win2k3\e$ /user:domain\administrator
*enter password*
then run this script, nlc is the group:
diskpart /s m:\destroy_(diskpart_script).txt
m:
cd reminst\images\nlc
\distribution\tools\x86\imagex /apply delld505.wim 1 c:\ /ref res.rwm

and destroy_(diskpart_script).txt consists of:

select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active


This will, of course, completely wipe the drive it's run on, with no warning, so don't screw up.

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