There are a lot of blogs, classes, tutorials, how-tos, workshops, links and opinions on how to best deploy Windows 7 using the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. What there’s a distinct lack of is how to make these tools work with XP which most of us are still using. I am planning to move to Windows 7 x64 later this year, but we have a software dependency on 32-bit Windows that we have to get past first (and no, Windows XP mode won’t cut it for this app)

I spent most of yesterday downloading software and patches. the Windows Automated Installation Kit 2.0 (which supports Win7, 2008 R2 and back to XP) was a 1.7gb iso file which took a couple hours.

Eventually last night I was ready to start the capture of an existing Windows XP box that I could then deploy to the other new machines.

This morning I tried to do it and it failed. I assumed it was permissions-based since the error was 0x00004005 which I know from past experience is “Access is denied”. After sorting that out, it still failed. Trolling through forums from a Google search, I found some people were able to get it to work by using the IP address of the deployment server, or sometimes the FQDN, rather than just "\\server\share$”

I rebooted, opened Windows Explorer and navigated to \\192.168.x.x\share$ and when it asked me to authenticate (because this is a workgroup computer and the share is a domain resource) I entered my credentials and then I double-clicked the litetouch.vbs script to kick off the imaging process. This time it seemed to work, it downloaded the WinPE files needed, ran sysprep and then rebooted to capture the image… except that’s when it failed.

Digging into the winpeinit.log I saw that there’s no NIC. Awesome. Great. I figured that the driver for the NIC would be part of the Windows image, but I overlooked the fact that the WinPE boot-time would also need the NIC in order to connect to a network share and create the disc image there, and the new machines would need the NIC driver to connect to that same share and copy the image down to the local computer.

No biggie, except that the computer is now stuck in a loop booting into WinPE rather than back into Windows XP. I injected the driver for the NIC into the deployment share’s Out Of Box Drivers and rebuilt/updated the deployment (which also adds the NIC driver to the winpe.iso file). All that’s left to do now is to PXE boot the machine which will download the new winpe (now with more NIC flavor) and start over… except now my PXE server isn’t configured properly :p