Deploy ODBC Settings via Group Policy
KB ID 0000805 Problem I’ve briefly mentioned this before when I wrote about Group Policy Preferences so when I had to do this on-site this week, I jumped straight into the group policy management console, and found that because my ODBC connection was using SQL authentication (with the SQL sa account), this would NOT WORK, (it only works with Windows authentication and even then it needs a tweak). If you are using SQL...
Windows Deployment Services – Asks for Locale and Keyboard
KB ID 0000734 Problem Seen when deploying images with WDS, even though you have specified language, and keyboard settings in your answerfile. The system still asks you to set the language and keyboard options. For a couple of machines you might put up with this, but for a few thousand machines it can get quite annoying! Solution There is a reason it’s doing this, and it’s because the next thing it asks you to do is...
WDS Deploying Windows Part 3: Carry Out an Unattended Deployment
KB ID 0000738 Problem In part two we built our reference machine and took an image of it using WDS. Now to automate the deployments we need to create some unattended answer files, these will answer all the questions that the Windows 8 machines will ask while they are building. We will take those files and import them into the WDS server we configured in part one. Finally to make sure everything is working we will deploy Windows 8....
Windows Deployment Services (On Server 2008 R2) Deploying Windows 7
KB ID 0000180 Problem It’s been a while since I posted run through’s on WDS – they were on Server 2003, and were for deploying Windows XP. I’ve completely re-written this page and shot a series of videos to make the process a little easier to understand. Solution Step 1 Notes 1. If the WDS Server is NOT the DHCP server then do NOT tick both the DHCP options, (as stated in the video), on your DHCP scope...
Installing Windows From USB
KB ID 0000191 Problem This weekend I needed to install Windows 7 on my shiny new Acer HTPC, but having no internal CD/DVD drive I needed to do this via USB. Quite a few times now I’ve needed to install Windows (Particularly Server 2008), on a machine that has no DVD Drive. You can now install both products from a bootable USB drive by doing either of the the following. Note: You will need a USB Drive with enough free space on it...