Step 1: Prepare to Create and Distribute Hardware Independent Images.

  1. Follow the steps in this help-file for the HIITools.

  2. If you change the Operating System and/or Service Pack level that you are deploying, you may need to return to a number of steps in this guide to update your HAL and/or driver files.

  3. If you want to be able to change your Administrator password without re-creating your images, do the following.

    1. When you install the OS on the source computer, leave the Administrator password blank.

      1. To supply or modify the Administrator password for Windows XP or 2003 using Encryption.

        1. Extract \\<YourServer>\Sysprep\DotNet\deploy.cab and run setupmgr.exe

        2. Choose to Create New | Sysprep setup, for any version, and do not fully automate the installation.

        3. Go to the Administrator Password section, choose Use the following, enter your password, and check Encrypt the Administrator password…

        4. Click File, Save, choose a location to save your temporary sysprep.inf file and click OK.

        5. Open the temporary sysprep.inf file in Notepad, select the line that begins with AdminPassword= and copy it to the clipboard.

        6. Edit the Sysprep.inf file that was created when you followed the Quick Start Guide in Step I.2. Replace AdminPassword=* with the line that you copied into the clipboard in the last step. Save the file.

      3. To supply or modify the Administrator password for Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, without using Encryption.

        1. Edit the Sysprep.inf file that was created when you followed the Quick Start Guide in Step I.2. Find the line that begins with AdminPassword= and replace * with the desired password. Save the file.

  5. You now have a tokenized Sysprep.inf that uses information in the Database to configure the computer. You can modify it with any token. For example, if you want the computer name to be WS-<SerialNumber>, you could replace %COMPNAME% with WS-%SERIALNUM%.  For a list of tokens, see Deployment Solution Reference Guide, page 500.

  6. Collect the drivers* for each device in your environment. The default method to do this is to use the steps in this guide in Step 6.

  7. If the default method either does not work, or is not available, you have 2 other options:

    1. Download the drivers from the device manufacturer’s website, extract them to <Deployment Server Install Dir>\Sysprep\Drivers\Manual and then run DriverSort.bat.

    2. Manually collect the files and place them here: \\<DeploymentServer>\eXpress\Sysprep\Drivers\<PNPDevID>, where <DeploymentServer> is the name of your Deployment Server and <PNPDevID> is the Plug-and-Play Device ID of each device in the following format: PCI\VEN_####&DEV_####&SUBSYS_########&REV_## .