Server 2008 WDS - this is bollocks

jibbajabba

I am currently studying for 70-643 and pretty much try everything in our lab .. First chapter - WDS ...

I mean I love the idea behind it .. took me a while to get all the necessary driver for NIC and Raid but eventually created several boot / install and capture images for 32 and 64 Bit ..

So far so good - what I didn't know / read is that it requires a sysprepped OS .. which is fair enough as I intended to sysprep it anyway .. BUT : What about other partitions ?

We normally have two arrays, the first one has one primary partition and one extended one with two logical volumes for software installations and temp files. The 2nd one is a data partition for things like SQL Databases.

I am working in a hosting company and deploy server on daily basis so WDS was brilliant .. until : You CAN NOT capture other partitions apart of "c:" ... This is just bollocks ...

This is supposed to be an Enterprise tool and I cannot image that using several partitions is a rare thing

</rant>

blargoe

It is possible to use the command line tools like imagex to capture additional partitions and apply the images to partitions. I'm not sure how to automate this using WDS though. I have in the past, just before the part where Windows is going to install in the WDS wizard, did a shift+F10 to bring up a command window, and have a batch file ready that takes care of the custom partitioning and blasting the image of the other partitions that I care about. There's probably a better way, I just haven't had the time to invest in finding it.

jibbajabba

blargoe wrote:

It is possible to use the command line tools like imagex to capture additional partitions and apply the images to partitions. I'm not sure how to automate this using WDS though. I have in the past, just before the part where Windows is going to install in the WDS wizard, did a shift+F10 to bring up a command window, and have a batch file ready that takes care of the custom partitioning and blasting the image of the other partitions that I care about. There's probably a better way, I just haven't had the time to invest in finding it.

Problem with Imagex is that you would need to install AIK on the reference server, do you not ?

Which means after restoring the images you would need to remove it from each deployed server which is kinda crap

blargoe

Naw, all you need is to copy imagex.exe to the server that holds the partition and take the image of the partition. Maybe another file or two that it depends on... I dont' remember. I've never installed the AIK on any machine other the administrative workstation from which I built the Vista-based PE images.