Systems Deployment

With Windows 2000 Pro there was a "trick" that you could that did not require using Sysprep or anything in order to make a "hardware neutral" image.

1. Load everything on your master image system, including all applications and what not. Setup the NTFS permissions and such as well. Our image has almost 30 different apps most of which require special NTFS permissions.

2. Take the system off the domain, and give it some generic name such as 2kmay04

3. Replace the IDE controller drivers with the Standard Dual channel PCI IDE Controller, and reboot so this driver is in place, instead of the system specific drivers. **This step is important**

3. Finally open Device manager and under System Devices Uninstall Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System. Do Not Restart when asked. Uninstall the few remaining devices that you can uninstall without restarting.

4. Shutdown the system and make a ghost image of this.

This image worked on all our machines from PII 400's all the way upto the latest systems and even our new IBM laptops. Once the image was put on a new system it would reboot into VGA mode automatically, and you would log on and it would start asking for any drivers it could not find. No worries about SID problems, because it wasn't part of domain and the NIC was reload so Windows just generated itself a new SID when the NIC was reloaded.

I've tried to do this with Windows XP but as soon as you uninstall the Microsoft ACPI device it reloads all the drivers. I cannot get SYSPREP to unload all the drivers in a manner that it will work across Hardware platforms.

I would appreciate any help with this, because I really do not want to have to make bunches of Ghost images for each different hardware type out there.