Dave Stork's IMHO : Windows Deployment

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Install Screenshots

dmstork — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:57:28 GMT

I’ve installed some screenshots of the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It was installed on VirtualBox with an 32 bit ISO. I forgot to make a screenshot were you configure the install disk, but that’s basically the same as Windows 7.

Download your ISO’s here. Also Windows Server 8 Beta also became available here.

And now for some screenshots!

Fishy! Remember this?

And here I forgot the drive configuration screenshot. But it’s basically the same as in Windows 7.

First boot.

Yep, cloud integrated

This was auto filled, probably from my Live ID. I also receive an SMS on my mobile phone to confirm or change these extra security settings via https://account.live.com/p. With this you add this computer as an trusted PC.

The Start Screen!

The desktop.

"Windows could not finish configuring the system".... Argh! update

dmstork — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:10:00 GMT

So, yesterday I started deploying Windows 7 on my laptop. But just as I finished posting yesterday, I ran into some problems. Well, big problem actually.

I made a capture of my laptop after a clean deployment. I added several programs dear to me, like iTunes, Firefox, some plugins and codecs. Because I was lazy, I had kept my data partition on the harddrive, but it didn't give any problems. I finished configuring just before adding Office and sealed it:

sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown

Then made a capture and imported it on my WDS server.

Everything okay, so I rebooted my laptop. And then.... well the following quote sums up my internal process during this Windows 7 deployment excorcise: "Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming"

The following errorbox appears:

Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration restart computer

No matter what I did, it stayed. Removed volumes, made new, formated them, even completly deleted all partitions... no luck.

Even the following forumtopics didn't help me:

There are more, but they all basicly point to those two topics.

I do have to check this one:

Error during setup after first restart

My working theory is that I shouldn't have had the extra data partition when capturing it, so that is my next move after I checked above post. But if anyone had a good idea, let me know!

ps.: the problem also is present when deploying it to a VMWare machine

* Update 17 august 2009 *

Well, after installing Windows 7 manually and capturing it with no extra partition and without some programs (Truecrypt for instance), the deployment with WDS now works without problems. Currently I'm making and testing an answerfile for unattended installations. w00t!

Deploying Windows 7 with Windows Deployment Services

dmstork — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:43:00 GMT

So after reading Sanders excellent blogpost "Windows 7 Migration Checklist", I decided to ignore his advice. I'm an early adopter, so i'm just gonna do it and see where that gets me.

I already run Windows 7 RC1 on my personal laptop, with great pleasure I might add. My gaming PC had a dual boot ow Vista and W7RC1, but i didn't use W7 that much. Other computers are running XP and are somewhat older.

My goal is to have every computer running Windows 7 and to deploy it via Windows Deployment Services.

Preparing WDS
So I installed WDS on Windows Server 2008 RTM, which is also my Exchange Server 2007 server. Not ideal, but I didn't have another server available. The installation went fine, I mainly kept it default.

I added the install.wim from the Windows 7 RTM DVD, which took some time. I could even select the editions of Windows 7. I choose all of them. After the installation image was succesfully added, the next step was a boot image. I choose the boot.wim from the Windows Server 2008 RTM DVD.

Deploying via PXE
The unattend files would come later, I wanted to install Windows 7 already! All things up and running, the PXE boot of my laptop worked, boot image loaded succesfully and I could edit my drives and select language settings and such.

But then.... an error:

Windows Package manager
Operation failed with 0x80070002
The system cannot find the file specified.

Frak... Tried it several times, but nogo. But then I remembered that when I configured the drives no System Reserved partition was made.... a new feature of Windows 7.... and that is something the boot..wim WinPE environment should know. Yes, after installing the boot.wim from the Windows 7 DVD it all worked like a charm!

Capturing a prepared image
So now I have a laptop running Windows 7 RTM, stil have to install applications and such. But my settings are marvelously transferred with the Windows Easy Transfer tool, included in Windows 7 and Vista. You have to make a backup of your old installation offcourse, but it works brilliantly.

Next thing is to make a sysprep (after finishing installation) and capture it to the WDS server. Unfortunatly, the creation of that capture image is not going smoothly. But I solved it eventally, WDS want to make a new WIM file based on the boot image that has already been imported. Point it to a location with enough diskspace (takes about 150MB, so that probably won't be a problem) and it generates a knew WIM file. Import it just like the boot image, but give it a suitable name (something with capture in it).

At this point when you boot via PXE, you will see a menu with two boot images. One to be used when deploying an image, and one to capture a sysprepped one. At the moment I'm capturing my laptop installatie of Windows 7 RTM. When that is done, I will deploy it to a self built desktopcomputer (not my gaming pc).

I used the following documentation:
Step-by-Step Guide for Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2003

Windows 7 Migration Checklist

Windows Deployment Services: A Real Ghostbuster Part 1

dmstork — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:02:00 GMT

I'm currently working on a relatively large project and it's one of the most complex migrations I have ever been part in. That is one of the reasons this blog has been a bit neglected. At the moment, most of my work on Active Directory and such only has to be fine tuned and that means less stress for me and more time to share my new found knowledge and experiences :). And with this post I will share my new found love for Windows Deployment Services on Windows Server 2008.

The Situation Report

There were two separate buildings, but I will concentrate primarily on the main building.

Next to a cross-forest migration (Forests A and B to C), a new deployment system for Windows XP Professional had to be designed. They already had Ghost and did use RIS and an upgraded RIS to WDS on Windows Server 2003.

Application deployment would be realized with SoftGrid 4.5 (now Microsoft App-V) in order to minimize application maintenance (They have about 200 applications), this would drastically reduce the amount of images and maintenance of those images.

With these other techniques the only requirements were that the new client OS deployment method could distribute one or two Windows XP installations to about 1000 computers in a relatively short time. Yes, multicasting is heavily implied here.

The physical network was already replaced with a Gb network with a ring redundancy. Our network guy guarantees it can handle it. To complicate things and to be able to secure the network, three VLAN's were implemented. Two for clients and one for servers and this means inter-VLAN multicasting....

The new forest is built upon Windows Server 2008 where it could, only a few servers are Windows Server 2003 R2. All servers were implemented in a VMWare ESX cluster with two servers.

The Objective

I already had some experience with Ghost (v11, i think) in combination with PXE and Ghostwalker. This meant that an (sysprepped) image would be deployed to a computer that was booted via the network. After deployment, Ghostwalker would change the computername and SID to prevent duplicates in your domain. The computername could defined so that Ghostwalker would change it every time automatically to the same one.

A similar strategy was my goal: the least amount of user input from booting to the login screen of Windows XP. After booting the computers start deploying the correct image automatically via multicast, then the sysprep would install the correct drivers, name the computer according to my whishes and automatically joins the computer to the domain. The only necessary user action needed until an usable logon screen appears: starting the PXE boot.

My instincts told me that WDS could be one of the solutions, my pride said it would be the most elegant one and my ratio said: Testing, testing and testing.

The How-To

Installing

Installing WDS is absolutely easy and no issue at all on Windows Server 2008. When using Server Manager, you just have to add the Windows Deployment Services role (both Deployment and Transport Server). I will not go into the difference between those two sub roles, but in this case (and most cases) you will need both.

Alternatively you can install them via command line using:

ServerManagerCmd -install WDS
ServerManagerCmd -install WDS-Transport

In our case the WDS servers is a member server and DNS and DHCP are installed on another server. Temporarily this is a DHCP server from one of the old forests and in another subnet (when this server is decommissioned, we would use DHCP relay and this is possibly not needed).

Having your WDS server in another subnet than your clients is no problem, but you will have to the DHCP server or scope options to enable DHCP options 66 and 67. Option 66 will need to contain the ip address of the WDS server and options 67 needs the boot file name (more on that later). If they are in the same subnet, this is not needed (actually Microsoft recommends not doing it).

Now your clients are able to boot via PXE and find your WDS server, but there are still some things to do obviously.

Boot Image: "need input!"

There are several different boot stages. One is the network boot, which enables the computer to find the Boot and Deploy or Boot and Capture Image. With WDS on Windows Server 2008 x64 clients with EFI BIOS are supported. I haven't seen anything of that yet, so I'll concentrate on the x86 versions.

The Boot image is a WIM file acquired from a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 DVD. The version is not important, although I want x86-32bit versions. And if you have only Vista DVD's (unlikely because you're using Windows 2008 as WDS server!), make sure you take the slipstreamed SP1 version. Otherwise multicasting will not work.

The WIM file has to be imported into WDS as a boot image, go to the Boot Image folder in WDS, just right mouse click, import and browse to boot.wim. As we will add at least one more boot image, name the image properly like "Boot and Deploy Image".

As default this will be a boot and deploy image, but you can convert an existing image to capture image. It's the same WIM file, but when booting from this it has been configured to look for sysprepped images and is able to capture it (to a local disc or directly to the WDS server). I tend to name this image "Boot and Capture Image".

With the boot image you can deploy sysprepped Windows installations after booting via PXE. As we don't have anything to deploy, the important thing now is to make a sysprepped installation of Windows XP or Vista. If not sysprepped, the WDS Boot and Capture image will not find a suitable prepared image to capture.

Prepping sysprep systems

In our case I will focus on XP. In the sysprep.inf the product license key, automatic domain join and other configurations are added in such a way no user input is necessary. There are some things to take in mind:

Make a separate domain join account and do not take the (or a)domain administrator account. You could encrypt the sysprep.inf, but I feel a dedicated account for domain joining computers only is the safer and more elegant way.
Make sure you have all you important drivers added, especially mass storage drivers and network drivers. In some cases you will have to seal the image multiple times on different hardware, in order to use the image on different hardware configurations.
Add the line "COMPUTERNAME = %COMPUTERNAME%", otherwise Windows will wait for user input (most of the time with an suggested random name). We will configure more via the WDS command line tool WDSUTIL, but (much) more on that later.

There is much more to it with sysprepping, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Next time…

The next part will elaborate on capturing and deploying your sysprepped image.