Altiris on Remko's Blog

Tips for using SysPrep with Altiris

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:29:32 +0000

Altiris has built in support for Sysprep when creating or distributing images.

The documentation doesn't mention some things that are worth knowing so I will try to address them in this post.

Sysprep support can be added to Altiris during the install where it will ask you for the Sysprep install files (deploy.cab) per selected OS.

If you didn't add Sysprep during install you can copy deploy.cab to one of subfolders in the Sysprep folder. Eg for 32 bit Windows 2003 deploy.cab goes to Sysprep\DotNet\x86:

As I wrote earlier in this post it's very important to use the correct Sysprep version as each OS has it's own version.

Add VMXNET3 driver to Windows PE PXE Image

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:20:08 +0000

After compiling the VMWare VMXNET3 Driver for Linux I needed a driver for the Windows PE Image as well.

Compared to what I needed to do for Linux this was a breeze!

First we need the VMWare tools again so I grabbed windows.iso from /vmimages/tools-isomages.

The driver files are in a cab file, VMXNET3.cab, extract this cab file somewhere and open the Altiris PXE Configuration tool.

Select the Windows PE Entry and click Edit:

Then click Edit Boot Image:

Compiling Drivers for Altiris Linux PXE Image Part 1

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:07:22 +0000

First we need to setup a Linux Virtual Machine with a distro of choice (I recommend a 32 bit version). I will be using Ubuntu here and the first step is to download the iso.

At the time of writing Ubuntu 10.10 was the Latest version so I used that one.

Create a new Virtual Machine and use the iso as install media, I am using VMWare Workstation and it recognises Ubuntu and performs an “easy install”:

The install is unattended (when VMWare Tools are installed you need to perform a login) and took only 6 minutes on my laptop!

Now we need to install gcc (the compiler), open the Ubuntu Software Center:

STOP: 0x0000005D when booting Windows PE

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:47:13 +0000

I was booting a new VMWare Virtual Machine with Windows PE through Altiris for initial deployment but Windows PE halted with a BSOD: