Need basic 70-680 help

My situation is this:

I've worked mostly as a phone tech for the last 20 years. My company provides a basket of services, so I get a little of everything, but definitely not enough on the computer/networking side. A few years ago I realized I needed to upgrade my skills, and then a series of brutal pay cuts (totalling 33%) has only exacerbated that feeling. So I went out and got A+ and Net+. But when I started looking around out there, I realized I needed a lot more hands on experience. I'm willing to start out as a help desk tech and hopefully work my way up. Which led me to the 70-680.

I'm not a computer superstar by any means. When I go on tech forums like these, some of the conversations leave me scratching my head. But A+ helped a lot. I see some guys who say they studied for a week or two and then passed. I'm just not that kind of guy. I studied A+ for 10 months. But I passed it, and I smoked the Net+ too. So I can say I work hard and I try.

Now in starting the 70-680, I'm running into some difficulties. I'm getting into some new areas here, that I have no familiarity with. But I have a lot of determination and I'm going to make this happen. So onto the questions. If these seem Luddity to most of you, my apologies.

1. I need to get squared away on the labbing aspect my studies. I'm using the MS-Press Training kit book, and it says I can do the labs using virtual machines. I know little about virtualization, but last night I went to VmWare and downloaded their player and it was all pretty simple. My machine at home is a W7 HP. I wanted to put W7 on the virtual machine and leave my OS alone. But when I tried to download the W7 evaluation copy from Microsoft, the confirmation email never arrived. So I now I have a virtual machine with no OS installed.

2. The W7 machine I use at home, it came with the OS preinstalled. There was no W7 disc. Now I see that in the practice examples I need to boot from the W7 disc in many instances. I know I created a series of recovery dscs at the time, but to my knowledge I don't have a W7 disc to speak of. What should I do about that?

Overall I'm finding the studies pretty tough. But I'm going t stick it out. The sticky resources are amazing. Any advice would be welcome, especially getting setup on the lab work.

Thanks

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narohi

You will be able to boot from the windows 7 evaluation copy .iso file. I didn't need to get an email to download the file, it just started downloading from Windows 7 Enterprise | Trial, Evaluation, Test, Download

Make sure you have an active windows live ID and put your profession as IT Worker or manager in the preliminary survey.

Psoasman

I am using Virtual Box for my labbing. It supports x86 and x64 versions, so you can lab with Server 2008 R2 editions.
I got some evaluation copies of Server 2008 R2. You can burn the .iso to disk for labbing, if necessary.
Main thing is to have enough HD space and RAM, especially for the servers.

VirtualBox

Windows Server 2008 R2 Evaluation Free 180-Day Trial

TechNet Virtual Labs: Windows Server 2008 ---virtual labs you can do.

Gomjabber

narohi wrote: »

You will be able to boot from the windows 7 evaluation copy .iso file. I didn't need to get an email to download the file, it just started downloading from Windows 7 Enterprise | Trial, Evaluation, Test, Download

Make sure you have an active windows live ID and put your profession as IT Worker or manager in the preliminary survey.

I did this last night. Got a Windows Live ID, did the survey, etc. At some point in the download it said it was sending an email for confirmation, which would then allow me to use the software. But the email never arrived. I'll try it again tonight.

Gomjabber

Psoasman wrote: »

I am using Virtual Box for my labbing. It supports x86 and x64 versions, so you can lab with Server 2008 R2 editions.
I got some evaluation copies of Server 2008 R2. You can burn the .iso to disk for labbing, if necessary.
Main thing is to have enough HD space and RAM, especially for the servers.

VirtualBox

Windows Server 2008 R2 Evaluation Free 180-Day Trial

TechNet Virtual Labs: Windows Server 2008 ---virtual labs you can do.

I'm still early on in my studies, but so far the practice has called for loading W7 clean and upgrading from Vista to W7. I'll do the server labs, but is there a way I can do the Vista to 7 upgrade exercise without buying an off the shelf copy of Vista?

Thanks for the links and info.

narohi

Gomjabber wrote: »

I did this last night. Got a Windows Live ID, did the survey, etc. At some point in the download it said it was sending an email for confirmation, which would then allow me to use the software. But the email never arrived. I'll try it again tonight.

Were you able to download the .iso? The e-mail they sent me didn't include any necessary information to use the trial.

Gomjabber

narohi wrote: »

Were you able to download the .iso? The e-mail they sent me didn't include any necessary information to use the trial.

Yeah sorry my memory was a little foggy. The email activation comes before the download begins. The product cannot be downloaded until the activation email is responded to. 1st I tried to download the X64 version and it wasn't available. So I clicked the x86 version, then it says its sending a confirm email, which never arrived.

I actually tried it here at work and was able to get the confirm email to my work address and download the file. Now I have to get it on disc so I can bring t home and that is proving to be an adventure as well.

If I was able to get the .iso file onto my home PC, could I load it into the VM without a disc?

narohi

Gomjabber wrote: »

could I load it into the VM without a disc?

Yes, most all (maybe all?) VM solutions provide virtual CD-Rom drives that can load an .iso file. Virtualbox and VMWare do as far as I remember.

Gomjabber

I am trying to stick this out, but it's tough. It's much more advanced than I anticipated. But I'm going to continue.

I have a couple questions regarding exercises in the MS Press book. I was able to build the sample answer file, which I found kind of interesting. My setup is my home PC which is W7 Pro, running VM Ware with a technician computer with W7 Enterprise free 90 day trial. My next task after the answer file was to build a reference computer. So I created another virtual machine. Then I booted from the W7 product disk, along with the autounattend.xml file that I have copied onto a flash drive. It appeared that the machine never saw the file as it walked me through the W7 setup as if it were a clean install.

One thing about the flash drive is I formatted it with diskpart before I copied the .xml file onto it. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to do that or not. Anyway the answer file didn't appear to work at all. But i finished the install manually anyway.

The last step in creating the reference machine is to run sysprep/generalize. I carefully copied the syntax and what happened was it said sysprep was working (yay) and the quickly said sysprep had encountered a fatal error and couldn't continue (doh). No further explanation.

Do any of you stalwarts have any suggestions or advice? Thanks a lot.

NOLAJ

Does your command look something like this...

sysprep /generalize /oobe /unattend:myunattend.xml ?

If so, how many times have you ran it?

If 3 or more, you're most likely running into an issue with the reactivation arm.

Gomjabber

NOLAJ wrote: »

Does your command look something like this...

sysprep /generalize /oobe /unattend:myunattend.xml ?

If so, how many times have you ran it?

If 3 or more, you're most likely running into an issue with the reactivation arm.

I ran it exactly as page 66 of the MS-Press book says to do it:

C:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe/generalize/shutdown

Thanks

pzero

Depends on what the error is. Sometimes when a sysprep fails it because the DRM stuff for WMP is running. The links will have what log files to check etc

More than 3 rearms....
An error message occurs when you run "Sysprep /generalize" in Windows Vista or Windows 7: "A fatal error occurred while trying to Sysprep the machine"

DRM
Sysprep - "Failure occurred while executing drmv2clt.dll" - Fix