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Question

XP master image for various hardware

Dec 17, 2012 4:54PM PST

good morning all,

just for some background i work as an IT technician for primary schools and we create and use alot of windows XP SP3 machines, with windows 7 we have a "master" image that has software and office installed etc. and we can do a direct disc to disc copy then find any extra drivers needed, i am looking if i am able to do this with windows XP

I am aware there's an issue with XP not remembering default drivers from installation CD like windows 7, also there is an issue with HALs, is there any way around this? or any software that will permit me to do so.

thanks in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Yes there is an issue with HALs.
Dec 17, 2012 11:50PM PST

It was such a pain that companies moved to less hardware versions in the fleet. It appears this issue is being re-learned by you.

How did they solve it? They created an image for each hardware system. Given how we can get many GB flash drives you can slowly inventory and create an image for each one. Then again most IT just would wipe and install XP with the drivers for that machine since they couldn't get the boss to OK the amount of time it takes to build images, setup the inventory and tracking system.

All this has been hashed out before. Nothing new going on here.
Bob

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getting around HAL issue.
Dec 18, 2012 4:43PM PST

I'm looking at a way to have the mini-setup after sysprep to install a new HAL as i do not wish to create multiple images (the variety of machines our customers own i would be looking at 30-40 masters)

as i continued searching i discovered this tut:
http://blog.doylenet.net/?p=91

in here the author does not talk about the HAL issue however he places this within the unattended file for mini-setup:
[unattended]
UpdateHAL="ACPIAPIC_MP,%WINDIR%\Inf\Hal.inf"

he says this is the "fix" for allowing uni-processor and multi-processor machines to work from this syspreped machine, does anyone know if this would work across various HALs, the overall solution on the authors post seems to be allowing all processor builds to run this image.

i am yet to test the authors tut and will be looking do so today, I have the majority of this week to play with this as 90% of our customers are primary schools and are either out of school or watching DVDs and doing plays etc..

i am aware I'm not heading into new territory however I'm 19 and only started working with windows XP in the past year or so.

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Answer
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Dec 18, 2012 2:42PM PST