Automating Windows Installations at Work

For the last several months I have been working on a solution for the company I work for to push out Windows installations quickly and effectively over the network. We used to use Microsoft's old Remote Installation Services, but that quickly became obsolete with newer computers and especially now that Windows Vista is becoming mainstream. We were forced to find something else. I installed the next generation of RIS, Windows Deployment Services. It worked well for Windows Vista installs, but you had to create an image of a Windows XP computer in a .wim format to deploy it via WDS. When attempting to deploy that image to computers with different hardware 90% of the time you would get a bluescreen when the computer attempted to boot.

Now I have moved on to Microsoft's Business Desktop Deployment 2007. It works in conjunction with WDS to automate the installation of Windows XP and Windows Vista and the deployment of applications to these installs. It really has been fun to get up and running.

I used nLite to integrate the new Serial ATA drivers that are required to be slipstreamed into the Windows source files. However, when Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released nLite became broken when using Business Desktop Deployment to install the operating system. Come to find out, I am breaking the terms of nLite's license agreement by using it at work anyway.

[code]5. nLite is free for personal use only, you cannot use it for any company or business purposes at this time.[/code]

So now I have finally been learning how to integrate drivers into my Windows source files by hand. It isn't that difficult. The instructions at this page really helped out a lot. I was able to easily get my textmode drivers to integrate into the setup routine and XP installed without any problems whatsoever.

Fun times!

(Image is copyrighted by Microsoft Corporation)