Question regarding sysprep

[theheyes]

Hi,

I was going to post this in the Windows forum but I thought it would be much more likely that you guys in here might know.

Basically I have a few PCs with varying hardware to rebuild - around 12 - which might not sound a lot but I have roughly 100 bits of software to install on each so anything that will speed up the process will help.

The question boils down to: if the HAL is the same, will a sysprep image work across machines with different hardware? The main differences between the machines with the same HAL are varying integrated graphics chipsets, hard disk capacity and amounts of RAM.

So, if I:

• Install a clean copy of XP
• Patch it up to date, install all the required bits of software but no specific hardware drivers
• Run the latest version of sysprep and clone the disk image with Clonezilla
• Stick the image on a machine with, say, Ati graphics instead of Intel
• Boot

Is this going to work? I have had a look online but I kinda get different answers, clouded further by the many products out there advertising "deploy on different hardware" as a selling point which makes me think that it is not as straightforward as it seems. I know I'll have to install the specific hardware drivers on a per-machine basis but that's not a problem.

I suppose one answer would be "just try it" but I'd rather not waste my time if someone could give me a definitive "no" or "yes, but you might have problems x, y and z". Any tips appreciated.

Cheers.

P.S. I know about Acronis universal deploy etc. but I'd like to know whether it is possible with sysprep. Thanks.

 

[theheyes]

Thanks for looking into it.

If the SATA controllers and chipsets are different will it just fail to load, or will it boot but behave strangely/be unstable in use? The latter is what I'm hoping to avoid - I'm rather it just refused to boot than lull me into thinking it's working.

 

[theheyes]

It will work, if all the IDE/SATA controllers/chipsets are the same. It sounds like this is not the case however.

<snip>

Sysprep does not do much "special" It resets the SID and allows you to re-enter specific information to make the machine unique.

Providing it boots, can I not just install the chipset drivers specific to that machine over the top? As I say they are all HP boxes and I can get the drivers online no problem.

 

[theheyes]

If you do a vanilla build, install software etc and make sure not to install any drivers then a sysprep should be fine; have you looked into Windows RAS over PXEBOOT (providing your machines have it)?

I've just had a look at RIS (you do mean RIS, right?) and it looks good but might be just a tad overkill for a small number of machines, and off the top of my head I'd guess that 1/3 of the machines don't have a compatible ethernet adapter. I'll definitely look into it in future when I have time and maybe some spare hardware to test, but I don't want to start going down a road that might take me more time than I have budgeted for.

I did think about just deploying the software via group policy, but I quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't a great option due to the lack of .msi installers. Also, a few pieces require a bit of tweaking to run under a limited user account which I would have to do afterwards. I get the impression this is much easier to do with Vista, but unfortunately this isn't an option at the moment.

If you seem to think I'll be okay with a vanilla sysprep I'm definitely going to give it a go. If all else fails I can just do it manually (and take an image for that machine so I don't have to do it again!) I'm pretty new to sysadmin so it's a constant learning process at the minute.

Some are AMD single core, some are AMD X2s and some are Pentium Dual Cores so I'm going to be doing 3 manual builds as it is - just wanted to see if I could cut a couple of corners so to speak.

Cheers and I'd be glad to hear if anyone else has any input.

 

[theheyes]

Cheers for all the input. I've been on holiday this week but was sad enough to take my Server 2003 manual and did a bit of reading on RIprep, the RIS flavour of sysprep which is apparently much less sensitive to hardware changes than sysprep. I wish I'd known about this earlier because I don't have time to test it out, but one for the future!

 

[theheyes]

Hi everyone,

Well I'm about half way through what I need to do using the sysprep method. It has worked a treat on about a third of the machines but the rest are a total nightmare. Basically I'm having loads of problems such as: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320279 and the system hanging when reaching the welcome screen. This happens even after I try to boot the master machine after running sysprep (no disk cloning involved i.e. literally the same hardware)!

Anyway, I'm trying to think outside the box a little and wondered if this would work. Basically I don't bother with sysprep at all and just clone the image to the other machines. Once this is done, I'll change the computer name and run newSID (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897418.aspx) Will this work? Is there anything I'm overlooking?

I'm going to try it tomorrow anyway.

 

[theheyes]

I would also advise taking images as you go through the process, 1 for when windows is installed, 1 for it being patched, 1 for AV/Firewall install. If you have as many apps as you say, then probably 1 every few apps. Nothing is going to be worse than wrecking an install and losing hours of effort.

Oh, and this is good advice. I'm so glad I took an image of basically 6.5 hours work before sysprep killed it. The joys.

 

[theheyes]

FYI the clone and then running newSID worked very well (identical hardware of course, if forgot to point that out a couple of posts up) which might be useful to know. It was quicker too.