I found the great tool Disk2VHD by Sysinternals. It converts your physical disk to a VHD file so you can use it in Virtual PC or some other virtualization software that supports Microsoft’s VHD format. Disk2VHD homepage http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

Before you start this you may want to make a backup of your VHD file in case something goes wrong.

Shrinking the VHD for Virtual PC

So I captured my old hard drive and moved it to my new workstation. The file was only 80Gb as Disk2VHD makes it a dynamically expanding disk. Everything looks fine so far. The problem is that Virtual PC only supports 127Gb drives or smaller and my physical drive was 250Gb so booting the drive in Virtual PC didn’t work. I had to get it resized to under 127Gb to get it booting. Googling around I found a few tools but none of them worked the way I needed them to. I had to get my drive size under 127Gb. Some researching later I found that the computer management console, disk management, in Windows 7 was able to mount and shrink my VHD. So fingers crossed I started compmgmt.msc and mounted the drive.

Right clicking on Disk Management and selecting attach Virtual Hard disk worked like a charm. So now let’s shrink the drive. Select your drive from the list and right click selecting Shrink.

After the query is done it will tell you how much it will be able to shrink the volume. If it’s still over 127Gb you can activate the drive in Computer Management and go delete some files. I had a lot of downloaded files I had to delete before I could get it to shrink under 127Gb. When the shrink operation is done we still have to shrink the vhd file. This just made our Windows partition smaller and now we want to get rid of the unused partition from the VHD file to get it under the magic 127Gb line.

VHDResizer to the rescue

All you need to do now is get the software vhdresizer and have it resize your vhd. You can get VHDResizer from http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx

Still no roses

I was hoping this would be the end of the journey and I would be able to boot the system. You could try it at this point but for some reason my system wont boot. I booted into the XP setup and ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR and the system still won’t boot. So next I tried an Repair install. Victory!

The repair install fixed any issues but I’m tempted to go trough the same again to check where this really fails. I’m sure you can do this without the repair install.

But the result is the same, I have my old desktop OS back and can use the tools when I need to and I didn’t have to reinstall from scratch. If anyone else has had the same problems and solved them without repair install I would be curious to know what you did.

Can a 32-bit server handle 64-bit drivers

Short answer, yes. The server uses it’s own 32-bit driver as a interpreter between the spooler and the printer but it can serve clients with the drivers they need. The server really doesn’t care if the drivers it serves to clients are 32 or 64 bit. It can store all of them on the filesystem.

How do I install the drivers?

I’ve been using Windows 7 RSAT(Remote Server Administration tools) to add the drivers to our print server. The important step is to upgrade your current 32-bit drivers. If the driver versions of the 32 and 64 bit differ the server wont recognize them as the same driver. So if you’re using old drivers on your server I’m sorry to say you’ll have to start by upgrading the 32-bit ones first. I suggest you download both the 32-bit and the 64-bit version of the driver when you’re out driver hunting. First upgrade the 32-bit drivers you want to add 64-bit drivers for. I did this directly on the print server and I removed any old versions of the driver. Next add the 64-bit driver. Adding drivers from RSAT is really simple so I won’t go trough it in any detail. Just open Print Manager

Right click drivers and select add driver, add your 64-bit driver. As you can see in the image booth Toshiba drivers have the same version number, the difference is only the Environment.

Group policy edits for Windows 7

Next we’re going to create a group policy to allow restricted users to install their drivers, and we don’t want UAC to disturb or scare them. Side note: if you’re thinking of disabling UAC take a look at a previous article here http://www.nixadmins.net/2009/12/04/why-uac-is-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-windows/ .

Open your Group policy management console and create a new / or add these settings to an old policy. You’ll find the setting under Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Administrative templates \ Printers \ Point and Print Restrictions.

Set the policy to Enabled and set the Security prompts Do not show warning or elevation prompt.

Push the group policy setting to your clients, point to your printer and you’ll be able to install it as a normal user.

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.