Trilight Zone

[digital8]

By: Don Hite
Posted On: 3/4/2005

One of the most time consuming events in an NT administrator’s daily life is finding the time to rebuild your company workstation or laptop. The time involved in this project may be as simple as putting in a ghost CD and performing final customizations or adding additional applications or utilities to it. It may even be that you have to find your Windows XP CD-ROM and build your workstation from scratch after you copied all of your personal files to a network share or burned it to a CD.

With either process there are some shortcuts that you can use to make the process quicker. This is especially true when so many other things seem to fill your plate on a daily or weekly basis and at the end of the day you find that you stumped along the entire day on a machine that you cringe and cross your fingers every time you logon to it.

To make things easier and therefore quicker, since time is of the essence in our busy daily lives I have found over time a few shortcuts. I find that if there is an application that I know is on the network or is in CD-ROM media format I try to either keep the CD-ROM’s in a centralized location at my desk or in a nearby filing cabinet. This is in anticipation for the day I need to dig in and just rebuild my machine or as they say in the Nike commercial “Just do it”. For the network based applications I create shortcuts to the networked media that I want or need to have installed in a folder on my home share called ‘Shortcuts’ (WOW, what a descriptive title!)

If you are like me you have a Windows XP CD-ROM that has service pack 2 slipstreamed into it with a customized unattended install text file (Unattend.txt or Winnt.Sif) with the NOS based install applications and settings tailored just for me. This works great for the ‘Base’ install but unless you remove certain directory structures from the CD-ROM you will find that the standard CD-ROM media is quickly filled to near capacity after you include security patches and hotfixes and maybe sneak in a few other small application install source files.

As an SMS administrator or someone who has access to a network share filed with Gigs and Gigs of SMS installer packages the build will go even faster after your final reboot from the Windows install media. For those of you with this type of access it is simply a matter of finding the installer package you need (Or go to your trusty home share and find your ‘Shortcuts’ directory) and just click on the pretty little icon and set back and watch the screen dance about for a few minutes.

There is no great need to spend hundreds of dollars to get an application to create your own customized NOS install. Microsoft has once again provided us with a no cost (Except for the licensing and purchase of the Windows media) and simple means of accomplishing this task. Best of all is the fact that it is actually included in the same media you are installing in the Support\Tools folder.

All you have to do is extract the deploy.cab file and then open the application called setupmgr.exe and it will guide you through the process of installing either a windows unattended installation, a Sysprep install or a remote installation servers or RIS install. There is also a complied help manual included called Ref.Chm that shows you exactly what you need to get started. It will also explain to you all of the lines that setupmgr has added to your unattended text file and provide you with further customizations that you can add such as desktop layouts and even network settings.