Glossary of Terms and Products

HIIT Hardware Independent Imaging Tools. This refers to all tools discussed in this guide.
Sysprep Microsoft tool for reconfiguring a system for first-time use, or Preparing a System. It clears numerous registry values, prompts a run of the MiniSetup wizard (that is included in all MS OS’s) and if given certain files, will auto-configure a system with certain settings including things like Timezone and others.
Sysprep Configuration file used with Sysprep.
DriverCollect.exe Altiris tool to collect device drivers from a representative system for later use on new systems. This tool simply collects all drivers from the system and sends them to the Deployment Server into a temporary location in the eXpress share\Temp\DriverCollect\%ID%\.  The files only remain in this location long enough for DriverSort to run.
DriverSort.exe Altiris tool to sort collected device drivers into appropriate locations on the Deployment Server for use in Hardware Independent Imaging. It looks through all the drivers collected by DriverCollect and sorts them into folders based on their specific ID number.  Any duplicates are discarded, but different versions of the same driver are kept.
System Restore This is a function of many of the newer MS OS’s to keep snapshots of the OS at certain stages of its progress. It is very useful to be able to roll-back to a previous state, but it takes up a lot of un-necessary disk-space when capturing images. HIITools will disable this and delete the snapshots when it captures an image.
TA / TAP Microsoft tools “Target Analyzer” that capture all the hardware devices and hardware information on a system.  The tool creates a file that is sent to the DS in a temporary location which is then parsed by DriverPrep to collect the appropriate device driver files that will be sent down with Sysprep on a newly imaged system.  TA is the DOS version, and TAP is the WinPE version of the tool.
DriverPrep This tool sorts through the PMQ file that Target Analyzer created, and based on the hardware present, collects all necessary drivers and HAL files into a temp folder to be copied to the client system under \Sysprep\Drivers\<OS_Version>\Temp\%ID%.
HAL Hardware Abstraction Layer. This is the set of files in an OS that “isolates” the hardware from the operating system.  It is designed to make all hardware look the same to the core OS files so that changes in the OS do not have to directly understand the individual hardware types.  Common portions of this include management of PCI, Drive types (i.e. SCSI vs IDE) and BIOS interaction.  If the HAL installed is incorrect, the OS generally will not run.