posted
Okay, so we're attempting to use SMS to push out an upgrade from Win2000 to WinXPSP2. (For various reasons, my boss won't consider doing fresh installs.)
Believe it or not, this works fine on most of our machines. Unfortunately, we have three models -- comprising about 35% of our user base -- that have network cards which are not included in the base XP install.
Normally, if you were doing a fresh install, you could put the drivers in the $OEM$ folder and forget about 'em. Sadly, if you're doing an upgrade, you specifically need to set OEMPreinstall=No in the answer file, meaning that the $OEM$ file doesn't get copied over or looked at.
Moreover, since the machine doesn't have network access once it comes back up on XP, you can't push the drivers over the network to it once the install is completed.
You CAN put something in the Run key in the registry (although not RunOnce, since Windows will not run an upgrade with anything in RunOnce) to run a script to install the drivers if they've been copied locally. Unfortunately, this runs with the permissions of the logged-in user -- and most of our users don't have permission to install drivers and/or edit the registry.
So what do I do? How do I slipstream these drivers into the base install?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
OK, grab roughly 200-250 strands of hair in each hand and pull outward with 20 foot-pounds of torque, twisting at a 47 degree counter-clockwise angle as you do so. You should feel the hair come smoothly out of your head almost immediately. It is handy to have a waste receptacle nearby, but you may wish to hurl the hair skyward as an expression of disgust and frustration. If after several attempts your hair does not come out as desired, wrap a rubber band around the hair and call tech support. Have your serial number ready.
Oh, wait, I misunderstood...
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Right now I'm laughing at myself, internally, for having the gall to think there might be something technical that I would know about that Tom doesn't. How arrogant you are, Me. Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Tom, is there a unified driver for your network card that works on Win2K and WinXPSP2? If so, can you push the updated driver out before upgrading to WinXP, then do the upgrade?
quote: and most of our users don't have permission to install drivers and/or edit the registry
I'm not clear on the whole situation, what kind of network configuration you have, size of network, etc, but if you have the users running off of a template (which I'm guessing you do), mebbe change the template permissions for each group, so that you can install the drivers just for this upgrade then bug the network card oem to come up with a solution so you don't have to keep doing that.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Sadly, the Win2000 drivers and the WinXP drivers for these three cards are completely incompatible, Dag.
And yeah, Storm, we assign out administrative permissions using a combination of local security groups and group policy. Here's the problem, though: even if I grant administrative permissions to a group of users, unless that specific user has logged into the machine prior to the upgrade, they will not be able to contact the domain (due to a lack of networking) and consequently won't be able to obtain the ACL that would give them the rights to administer the machine in the first place; until a local copy of the user profile is cached on the machine, domain login won't work. (This shouldn't be a problem on faculty/staff boxes, but we can't count on consistent logins in those of our labs that we aren't ghosting.)
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I don't know much about streaming upgrades (it seams like an extraordinarily bad idea, since you can do remote automated ghosting just fine), but might it be possible to decompress the generic driver CAB files, add the driver you want, then zip it back up? I have no idea if Windows does a checksum or MD5 on those libraries to verify their integrity, if it doesn't, that might work.
posted
As far as I know, Windows does a checksum. But I could be wrong; if anyone else knows for sure, please let me know. *laugh*
BTW, the reason I've been told not to simply ghost all these installs is that there's substantial concern about losing user files and information stored on these machines; not all of our users have adapted to saving things to the network share, nor to the concept of a network home folder, and my boss has been disinclined to mandate it.
If you're aware of a good way to ghost a fresh install onto a machine without losing Outlook profiles, favorites, and miscellaneous files (which may or may not be a major concern), particularly a solution that can be easily implemented within two weeks, I'm all ears.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Tom, I'd reccomend paying MS for a tech help ticket and seeing if they have a solution. If they can't help, they usually don't charge, and if there's an answer out there, a couple hundred dollars is probably worth it.
When you push an upgrade, can you tell it to look in a particular directory for missing drivers? Or is that what the $OEM$ is supposed to be for?
posted
Unfortunately it sounds like you're just going to have to bite the bullet and install the driver upgrades manually with a temporary login ID designed for the technician to add the drivers.
Even if you manage to solve the script problem, you aren't going to be able to bypass the security issue of having non-authorized users access to the areas they were denied from initially.
quote:Unfortunately, we have three models -- comprising about 35% of our user base -- that have network cards which are not included in the base XP install.
How many machines are we talking about here, Tom, in actual numbers?
I referred this thread over to the guy here at work who is kind of our "TomDavidson" of the bank (does all network roll-outs, etc.) and said it doesn't look very promising, seeing as how you have old network cards in those PCs, and users don't have admin rights to installs (our users do).
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