[mindless]

Hi,

To prepare my image I have set up a VMWare Workstation (4.5) virtual machine and installed Windows XP SP2 and some applications. I then syspreped (-reseal -mini -pnp) and ghosted this installation to an image.

When I try to deploy the image to a IBM Thinkpad A20m, the mini-setup starts fine, but when the first window appears where I need to press the NEXT button, I figure out that I have neither mouse nor keyboard control :-(

any ideas?

bye
Marcus.

This post has been edited by mindless: 07 November 2005 - 03:51 PM

[Scrapple]

3 ways of doing this:

1) the driver for the mouse and keyboard pc is probably not in the image, so you should include them and set their paths in oempnpdriverspath (sysprep.inf) before sysprepping...
(use the boards' search-function if you don't know how to do this)

2) you could also install the drivers before sysprepping with setupcopyoeminf.exe. That way makes sure windows driver-database knows about them.

3) If you want to have the drivers working really early in the boot-up process, you should make the settings under the [SysprepMassStorage] section. Yes, this will work with other drivers than massstorage too!
(just like when you would add a mass-storage driver manually in sysprep)

This post has been edited by Scrapple: 06 November 2005 - 06:44 AM

[Bâshrat the Sneaky]

Did you remove some drivers with nLite? (Or did you forget to add the correct drivers?)

[mindless]

Hi,

Well, I didn't remove anything. What I did, I made a sysprep -clean before the reseal.

What really confuses me ist the fact that standard keyboard and mouse devices are used. In the VMWare as well as on the Thinkpad. Usually no special drivers are needed - so I wonder why these drivers are not present when booting the mini setup....

Anyhow, how can I include them in the image? How are the drivers called and where would I find them (they are part of the standard Windows XP installation)?

bye
Marcus.

Scrapple, on Nov 6 2005, 01:42 PM, said:

3 ways of doing this:

1) the driver for the mouse and keyboard pc is probably not in the image, so you should include them and set their paths in oempnpdriverspath (sysprep.inf) before sysprepping...
(use the boards' search-function if you don't know how to do this)

2) you could also install the drivers before sysprepping with setupcopyoeminf.exe. That way makes sure windows driver-database knows about them.

3) If you want to have the drivers working really early in the boot-up process, you should make the settings under the [SysprepMassStorage] section. Yes, this will work with other drivers than massstorage too!
(just like when you would add a mass-storage driver manually in sysprep)

This would mean that I need 3rd party drivers. But the Thinkpads Keyboard and mouse usually work with the standard PS/2 drivers that come with Windows XP. I am wondering why these drivers are not included in the image as they are also in use within VMWare where I created the master copy. I am also not sure how to add drivers that are actually part of Windows XP (no idea where they are located, I guess they are already somewhere in c:\windows\system32)

bye
Marcus.

[Scrapple]

Do not use sysprep -clean before resealing.

What that does is remove all -non present hardware- drivers from the critical driver section in the registry, so they won't load on boot.
You should only do a -clean in runonce when the image is already deployed.

Besides that, I think I know what your problem is. I've had this problem before myself when I built my master-image in VirtualPC. It worked fine on a normal pc when I didn't include the virtual pc additions, but when I installed them in the virtual pc I wouldn't have working keyb/mouse on the deployed machine.

I don't know VMWare, but I suspect it has some kind of additional feature -like the additions in VPC- which will install it's own virtual keyboard/mouse drivers/service, but for which there is no hardware-emulator present on the real deployed pc!

So it's probably not the case that your input-drivers are not present in the image, but there's actually a virtual mouse/key driver loaded that wants to handle it. There's a driver/service too much!!!

The likely solution is to NOT-install or just remove the additional easy-input functionality at all in the virtual machine, before you sysprep and clone it. That way the virtual input driver is not present and not loaded in the deploy pc.

Let us know if it worked.

This post has been edited by Scrapple: 06 November 2005 - 06:05 PM

[mindless]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for your help!

Unfortually I was not very successful yet. I removed the "sysprep -clean" command from my script, but it did not change anything on not having any mouse or keyboard after restoring the image.

About the special drivers: I never installed the VMWare tools which is the VMWare equivalent of what you mentioned above. I left them out on purpose to make sure I am not running into these kind of driver problems...

Any further ideas?

Thanks in advance,
bye
Marcus.

[mindless]

SOLVED!

It seems that he didn't like the -pnp parameter. Actually I am not quite sure why it works now without this parameter, but when I just use -reseal -mini it works fine!

Thanks for all of you participating in my problem!

bye
Marcus.

[Scrapple]

Glad you solved it.

The "-pnp" switch is only necessary when you want to detect non-pnp (legacy) hardware.

I don't know why this switch stopped the driver loading for key/mouse...
If anyone have any idea why that happens, please tell.