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Sometimes when you finish installing your Windows operating system you are missing drivers. The easy ones like chipset,network and graphics are easy to find, but what about the rest? Below is a screenshot of the details on the Intel Gigabit network card. Nothing special there, it’s installed and it’s working fine.

If Windows wouldn’t be able to find drivers for it the Details pane would still be visible and you would se the Device Instance Id. From that one line we can get everything we need. So let’s try it out.

In the beginning of the line PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_10BD&SUBSYS…. VEN stands for the Vendor, this being Intel and DEV for the device in question. So now that we know this much just head over to pcidatabase.com and enter the DEV id 10BD into the device search.

Voila. As you can se we now have both the vendor and the device. Now just head over to the vendor website to get your drivers. If you think this is a mess and don’t want to do it the hard way there are software’s doing the exact same thing, but it’s always good to know how to search for them yourself and where to find the information in case you need it.

As a last note, this was made on a Windows XP Professional desktop but the same system applies to Vista and the Server operating systems.

Windows deployment services was released to replace the old Windows RIP. Windows Deployment Services (WDS) makes it easier for us to deploy Windows Vista or even Windows XP using images. In this article I will go trough some of the steps I had to do to get everything up and working. For someone using Microsoft only environment this should be a very straightforward process but we run DHCP on Linux servers and have quite a mixed environment so there where some things to consider.

What you need

- Technician computer (your desktop/laptop)
- Master computer (the computer from which the image will be captured)
- Client computer (In the example this is the same as the master computer)
- Windows Deployment services configured and running on a server.
- DHCP server in the network.

First of all install Windows Automated Installation Toolkit to your technician computer. You will need it to modify the WindowsPE image we use to capture the .wim image.

Creating and imaging an Master Installation

First and foremost you need to have a Master installation. This will be the starting point for any of the deployments you will do so think carefully about what you want to install on this machine. Because we still deploy Windows XP Professional 32-bit this is what this article will cover. At some point I will make a Vista image article but let’s save it for later as the process is almost the same.

Things I want to install are Microsoft Office and programs that we don’t deploy normally trough group policies or other central management systems. I also like to change the OEM information on our installations, like adding the company logo at the Computer information page and information on how to get in contact with our support. So if you have a logo in some format save it as oemlogo.bmp and create oeminfo.ini file. In the oeminfo.ini add the following lines

[general]
Manufacturer=Your Company name
[Support Information]
Line1=For technical support call
Line2=123-456-789
Line3=http://www.nixadmins.net/

Of course change the settings to match your own company. Done customizing? Let’s get on to generalizing the computer.

Using Sysprep to prepare the computer to be imaged.

To remove anything that identifies this computer we need to run sysprep on it. If you are installing Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 from your Volume License media slip it in and go to SupportTools. In the folder you’ll find Deploy.cab. Extract sysprep.exe,setupcl.exe to C:Sysprep. Also copy the I386 folder from the CD to C:I386, we will need it if we want any kind of regional settings applied to the installation. While we are at it extract the setupmgr.exe to your technician computer, this step is optional but it speeds up creating the Sysprep.inf file quite a bit. Done?

Start up setupmgr.exe on your Technician Computer and select Create New and Sysprep setup file, select Windows XP Professional. Select fully automated and start filling in blanks, fill in the local administrator password also, you can encrypt it and the sysprep folder will be deleted from the target computer once the image is done. We won’t make this installation fully automated (even if we chose that option, but you still can) because I want to keep our company naming policy on the computers. So after filling in your volume license key and owner information save the sysprep.inf file somewhere and open it for editing.  Your file should look something like this.

;SetupMgrTag
[Unattended]
    OemSkipEula = Yes
    DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore
    ExtendOemPartition=1
    InstallFilesPath=C:i386
    TargetPath=WINDOWS

[GuiUnattended]
    AdminPassword=A lot of bla bla.
    AutoLogon=Yes
    AutoLogonCount=3
    OemSkipRegional=1
    OemSkipWelcome=1
    TimeZone=125
    EncryptedAdminPassword=Yes

[UserData]
    OrgName=”Your company name”
    ProductKey=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
    FullName=”IT Department”
    ;ComputerName=* ;<- Notice I commented this line out to make the Mini installer ask for a computer name. 

[RegionalSettings]
    LanguageGroup=1
    Language=0000081d

[Sysprep]
    BuildMassStorageSection=Yes

[TapiLocation]
    CountryCode=358
    Dialing=Tone
    AreaCode=09

[Branding]
    BrandIEUsingUnattended=Yes

[Proxy]
    Proxy_Enable=0
    Use_Same_Proxy=0

[Identification]
    JoinDomain=domain.com

[Networking]
    InstallDefaultComponents=Yes

Compare your file with the one above. That’s how it should look like. After you are done with the file copy it over to the same folder you placed sysprep.exe on the master installation. Which should be in C:Sysprep. Once that is done let’s prepare the computer for ImageX.

Open the command line (cmd.exe) and go to the C:sysprep folder. In the folder run

. The switch mini stands for mini setup which will be called once the computer reboots, it will use the sysprep.inf file to fill in as many of the blanks as possible. So if you are using a file like mine it should ask only for a computer name. The reseal switch clears Event Viewer and prepares the computer for delivery, it also sets the mini setup to start at boot up. Once Sysprep is done the computer will shutdown.

Follow up

So what have we done so far?

- Set up the Technician computer with Windows Automated Installation toolkit and setupmgr.exe.

- Created a master installation to use as a base for our future images.

- Used sysprep to prepare the computer for ImageX.

In the next article I’ll go trough setting up a custom WinPE image to use to capture our current master installation using ImageX and using it to capture the .wim image to our Windows Deployment server. So I hope to see you in a few days once the next part of this article is done.

I got my Lenovo X200s in January, it’s a small and great laptop and easy to carry in server rooms etc. But since I got it I’ve never got the Ericsson F3507g HSDPA module working properly. I can’t even get it to initialize and it’s driving me mad. So today after a power outage here at home I thought  I’d really dig in to the problem and try to get it solved. So first of I head over to Lenovo to find drivers, click support and downloads and drivers.  WTF!!

This is not the way a site should look from one of the largest laptop manufacturers. And believe me this is not the first time. It probably won’t be the last either.

So I get annoyed but think what the heck, I’ll find the drivers to the Ericsson module somewhere else. Well dream on. I can’t find any drivers for this god forsaken thing.

Access connections tell me nicely that the system contains incompatible drivers and I need to get the latest drivers and install them on my system. WELL I WOULD GOD DAMMIT! If I could get them somewhere.

So now I think I can get something from Thinkvantage System Update, but no. There are no updates available for this machine.

If you are reading this and you are considering a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, think twice. I can’t say the laptop itself, it’s a nice piece of machinery but Lenovo has THE worst website I ever had to use. Of the 50+ times I’ve had to visit them the error rate has been well over 60% and that’s just not acceptable these days.

I even remember when I was trying to decide on my next laptop and doing research I couldn’t get specifications on the X200 from their site(to make it even more ridiculous it doesn’t work today either). I guess that should have sounded a few warning bells.

I used to be mad at HP:s download site because the download speed was really low but at least their site works.  If you’ve read this then I thank you and you are really welcome to comment to ease my pain. And if you have found a solution for the Ericsson module then PLEASE let me know.

I stumbled on a video at Microsoft.com today hosted by Mark Russinovich. If you are running or thinking of deploying Vista have a look at this panel discussion. It’s a little over 1 hour but it’s worth every second.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/cc952917.aspx?ITPID=fr2189s

I actually got a few aha’s and a few doh’s from watching that video.