Generic Image?

[TubbieToast]

I configure/setup computesr at a university and have a corporate license available to me. I was wondering if there was a way to possibly do a windows install with NO DRIVERS at all. I am basically looking to make a generic windows image for all the machines on campus making it easier on the tech department any input on the issue would be appreciated.

 

[riser]

If you're using 2000/XP for your images, you'll run into a problem at the HAL level. (Hardware level)

Any computer that uses the same Motherboard should work with an image.

Let's say you have all Dell Dimension 9000s or something like that. The image will work on all of those.
But if you get a Dimension 9500, it might not if the motherboard (and chipset mainly) have been changed. You'll have to create a new image.

Moving along with that process.

Take your PC, install all the drivers you want, Nvidia, ATI, NICs, etc. onto a PC.. or, uninstall everything from the computer under Device Manager. Set up whatever software, etc, you want as default for your image.

Mircrosoft has a program called "sysprep" (system prepraration) that, once you have the image how you want it, you run from a command line. This pulls out the SID (Security Identifier), computer name, etc. It'll walk you through a little wizard and ask you questions, like your corporate key, computer name, etc, etc. It's nice.

It will then shut the computer down. Now, you have to create an image of that. Create your image and you can go from there... you can use Ghost if you want in that case.

OR if you have servers running RIS (Remote Installation Service) you can go that route, which takes a little extra setup time and making sure all your PCs can boot to network. At that point, using RIS (ripprep) you can push your image up to a server and by bootting to the network, you'll get the option to pull your model info down.

Hope this helps, if you have more questions, just post back.