Remember In the good old Windows XP days, when the Time Zone you used when creating your Sysprep.inf/Unattend.txt was just a number you could look up in a Microsoft table (and properly also remember) Well those days are almost gone and now you will have to use Time Zone ID which is a Name rather than a number, so the Danish time zone that used to be 105, is now Romance Standard Time… So the question then is, where do i get a hold of those names?? The answer is simple…TZUTIL which is an embedded windows 7 command line tool. [...]

  Create a new package called Microsoft XP MUI   Note: It is not necessary to create a program for the package unless you intend to advertise the package to clients. The Microsoft XP MUI package should contain the files from the root of one if the MUI installation CD’s, and any language packages you wish to install. In this case a included the Danish, Russian, Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional) language MUI’s. Now open your TS in edit mode, and add a Run Command Line step at the end of your TS (or at least after the Mini setup [...]

  Because of the issue with different HAL’s (Hardware Abstraction Layer) used by XP, it is necessary to make some changes to both Sysprep, and the Kernel files during deployment.. I thought I'd supply my HAL changing script, as it does not require the reference computer to be to build  from a specific XXX, and you do not need to add any files to the image beforehand, as that will done by the script. You will have to either integrate MDT into SCCM, or run the script from a package containing this script and  ZTIUtility.vbs from the MDT package. Just [...]

I know there are different ways to add regional settings to you build during OS deployment, and some of them are quiet confusing… I'm not trying to put any of the methods down, but I would like to suggest an easy way of adding simple stuff like: Keyboard settings Time Zones Local Settings And all the other sysprep settings. The way I do this is quit simple, and it works every time.. (almost ;-)   As we are going to use a couple of MDT scripts,  creating a package with the necessary configuration files is necessary. If you are already [...]

Before you start any server deployment projects save you self a lot of time by reading these documents: IBM server deployment - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/toolsctr/v1r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.xseries.tools.doc/deploy_tools_sgst.html HP server deployment - http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPSCCMOSDWP Dell server deployment - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Dell+Deployment+Pack+for+Configmgr+%28Server+Deployment%29?t=anon

When using  System Centre Configuration Manager for OS deployment you always use WinPE as your boot media/environment for deploying  the actual image… Normally you can just use the boot image supplied with SCCM (a WinPE 2.1 wim, taken from WAIK and placed in \\”SiteServer”\SMS_”SiteCode”\osd\boot\”architecture”\boot.wim), with out any further considerations. Well you might have to inject some NIC and Storage drivers, but that's properly it! A problem you might run into though, is lacking functionality of that WinPE build, like no HTA, MDAC/ADO support etc, or you might need to ad a “Custom media hook” to run a script prior to [...]

  If you want to run a script before the actual TS start, well even before the boot CD looks to SCCM for policies to run, you could add a Custom Media Hook. The Media Hook will run a script defined in an INI file and not enter TS mode before it has finished.. This could be useful in any number of scenarios like cleaning the disk, enabling the disk if it has been encrypted,  setting variables, entering data to DB and so on and so on. Now enabling this feature is quit simple, and then again it is not! [...]

  Setting up WDS 1. If WDS is already installed go to step 4 2. Make sure you are running Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later 3. Go to "add or remove programs" and open "add/Remove windows components". Scroll to the bottom of the wizard and check of "windows deployment services" and hit NEXT (Make sure you have the srv2003 source files as you will be prompted for files) 4. to check the status of your WDS open a command prompt and type wdsutil /get-server /show:config 5. If WDS operational mode is Mixed or legacy, you are done. 6. In [...]

  Deploying XP with different languages can sometimes be a real challenge. Not that it's that difficult to make the different settings in sysprep.inf or unattend.txt but you still need to make sure the correct files are present during installation, and depending on how you do this, a number of things can go wrong. First let me point out that, this guide assumes that we are working with BDD/MDT or SCCM and therefore do not have the ability to manipulate the behavior of winnt32.exe (the executable used to start the Windows XP installation) by adding different command switches. Normally we [...]

  So, I don't know if there are any one out there who still playing around with BDD/MDT and SMS? if not your are the lucky ones... Myself I still have customers who are running that setup... Basically it runs fine, but there is always the issue with updating WinPE with NIC and Storage drivers... Recently (well yesterday actually) I had to update WinPE to work on a "DELL Precision T5400" with a non built in SAS 6 Storage Controller. Normally its not that difficult to add storage controllers to WinPE 1.5, I just import them in trough SMS, and [...]

  I recently had a customer who couldn't re image machines because of some hidden partition stuff on manufacture preloaded machines. It actually turned out that a couple of files needed to be removed prior to running the TS. So we added a  script to be run prior to the launch of the TS, to get rid of these files. Its not like its a big secret, how you do this, as it is in the WinPE.chm but I thought just make small description of the steps anyhow. 1. MountRW SCCM boot.wim with ImageX - ImageX /MountRW C:\boot.wim 1 C:\mount [...]