Re: XP Deployment question

That's what i have started planning, we can probably get it down to a dozen
inages in total and they will all be stable platforms.

The only other suggestion has been to make a standard image on any old
platform and before using sysprep remove the mass storage controllers, the
ACPI multiprocessor PC (or equivalent), the USB root hubs and any other
mainboard devices etc from device manager. Then run the seal on syysprep,
shut down the pc and take the image. When another platform boots up into this
image and starts building it will detect the different devices it has without
so much risk of a BSOD.

Not sure about this route, it appears it will save time now but it seems a
bit messy to me - anyone have thoughts on this method?


Thanks,

Andy


"Roberto" wrote:


"Andy Yates" <AndyYates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1EA9BE8E-33EF-4FA4-B6CE-296F8E500B97@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello,

I've just started a new contract working on an XP rollout for a client.
They
have about 100 PC's to upgrade from Win98 to XP Pro and told me they had
developed a standard image and just needed assistance in planning the
deployment and the physical rollout itself.

It now transpires that they have about 20 different models of unbadged
desktops and half a dozen different laptops. They were planning to lay the
same ghost image on each machine and then add extra drivers, copy the
hal.dll
etc to get them to work.

Now, I've been involved in about a dozen large corporate rollouts and have
never come across this type of approach. I usually deploy a seperate image
for each model of hardware, and in a medium/large business environment
they
tend to buy desktops in bulk (100's to 1000's at a time). This makes an OS
upgrade easier as there is a common platform.

What is going to be the most stable way to deploy a build in this case?

My initial feeling is that there isn't going to be one image as the client
thinks, but dozens - it's going to be down dictated by common motherboard
chipset and CPU etc.

I have a feeling they are up against it here, however it means that my
contract may run longer than I thought.

Any thought or ideas please.

PS - the client is a registered charity, and the option of a complete
hardware refresh is not an option.


Thanks,

Andy

Using a "standard" image on different hardware platforms is going to
be trouble - especialy if there are large differences in chipsets
etc, you should explain this to them.
You could well spend more time resolving BSODs etc, [some may not even
boot to the desktop], than it would take to do fresh installs, in
particular the Notebooks would be a challenge.
All I can offer is try and find a group of machines with close/simillar
HW and make an image for them.

good luck
rgds
Roberto




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