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RIS Imaging: Win 2003 Ent Svr Challenge


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Large Government Organization needs your help with RIS 2003 imaging. I am willing to take some egg on the face and tauntings if this is a silly request. Getting the required information will save "hundreds" of hours of time.

Premise:

With Ghost imaging, we developed a "universal" image process for installing a single NT based OS (2K, XP, 2K3) across a complete line (P2 No-name to P4 Dell PCs and Servers) of computers. Very easy process, doesn't use complex answer files and doesn't "force" anything. Very easy to do if you start in the right spot and it is not a Ghost process.

Situation:

My team has been tasked with developing a RIS (Svr 2003 Ent) solution for this large Gov organization. I want to use the universal technology on RIS images. Preliminary tests say it should work.

Problem:

Win 2003 RIS has a "HAL filter" put there by "BIG BROTHER" to protect us from dumb technicians who might injure themselves. What do we even need NTFS permissions for, we've got a "FILTER". What good is a "universal process" if the HAL filter stops you from installing it universally.

Solution: Please help (Project progress due "soon")

I can solve the issue if any of the following three questions are answered:

1. In pushing up the image and pulling down the image, where does the RIS server read the HAL type from? Is it the Registry, the BIOS, the HAL Files, where?

2. Removal of the HAL Filter. The process will work if someone can tell me how to turn the filtering off.

3. If you can't tell me how to turn the filter off, can you tell me how to make the RIS server see every PC imaged as having the same HAL. Then by default, RIS sees every computer as having the same hal, thus no filtering.

Caveats: Please no lectures about the "HAL", the right hal is applied by the image process, regardless of Computer type.

What you get for your help?

1. I will allow myself to be photographed in a public square worshiping you according the real or imaginary God of your choice.

2. If it's legal, I'll try to give whatever I can.

Thanks,

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I agree with Nilfred. Plain RIS combined with app deployment via GPO sounds exactly like what you need. I chucked Ghost years ago as it no longer serves a purpose. So as far as RIS itself goes, I don't think you need to be messing around with any HAL files or filters.

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Caveats:  Please no lectures about the "HAL", the right hal is applied by the image process, regardless of Computer type.

Hi, could you explain to me how you do your correct HAL detection and installation on different hardware by using 1 universal image? There are several ways to do it, but I'm interested in new ways.

What exactly do you mean by HAL filtering? Does it mean the RIS server checks if the pc it is about to deploy an image to, is adequate enough to even put the image on? Then it must know what HAL is in the image in the first place... and look for compatibility differences, I presume? Please explain... I'm confused...

... there is a tool called ta.exe (included with windows xp embedded) that will check what HAL the pc can optimally run... maybe somehow it's code is incorperated in RIS HAL-filter???

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  • 3 months later...
1. In pushing up the image and pulling down the image, where does the RIS server read the HAL type from?
The HAL type is determined by the setup routine querying the power management and ACPI/APM values in the BIOS upon boot (either from shadow ROM or direct query, depending on BIOS configuration).
2. Removal of the HAL Filter. The process will work if someone can tell me how to turn the filtering off.

When I used to use Ghost, I had a 7MB partition up front on the drive (C:) that the system would boot to first - the admin chose the machine type from the menu, and the script would copy the correct hal.dll and driver set from the C: partition to the %windir%\System32 directory on the Windows partition (D:). It would then hide itself (using gdisk), and the system would reboot into Windows, convert the drive to NTFS and reboot, then continue with sysprep's version of mini-setup.

This worked for YEARS, until the advent of SATA chipsets. After this, I couldn't get a sysprep image from a master machine to work on these SATA machines (not all, but most chipsets) when hardware detection was enabled in sysprep (and unfortunately, this was still necessary). I went to RIS to solve these problems about two years ago, and haven't looked back.

3. ...can you tell me how to make the RIS server see every PC imaged as having the same HAL. Then by default, RIS sees every computer as having the same hal, thus no filtering.

If you're using RIS with flat image files, you won't have any need to do this. Windows setup will determine the proper HAL for your machine. If you plan on using riprep to do this, you won't even be able to do the sysprep hack I mention in my response to question 2, but I'd say riprep isn't a very good way of doing RIS - if you're going to use RIS, you should use flat files only.

When Vista and Longhorn server are both out, you'll be able to use WDS and XImage natively to create and deploy OS images, but for now you're stuck with either sysprep+Ghost+HAL hack or RIS flat files to make what you want to do work properly.

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