Hello all, new to the forum but i've been following wendell for a few years now. Basically i'm a true level 1 tech at a small pc repair/building shop (2 people) and I would like to learn how to create a driverless image that i can use to deploy to all machines and just fetch drivers afterwards. Currently my solution has been keeping certain oems on their own hard drives. Dell images on their own drive, lenovo on their own, hp on their own, etc. Using ghost for win 7 images and macrium for 8 and above. I know there was a video where wendell discussed that they would have a vm that was dedicated to a win 7 image that was driverless and always getting updates and that would literally be what i want to achieve as it would save me hours on manually updating these machines... I would just need to learn how to build that and capture it. I know about vms, but i don't know how I would go about making it driverless and how I would capture it. (I was a networking guy who got lucky with the job.) If anyone has any good leads or ideas, please help me out!
One method that I used is creating base images in a server with proxmox setting the cpu type kvm64 on the vms (which according with docs is a Pentium 4 look a like CPU type, which has a reduced CPU flags set, but is guaranteed to work everywhere) and after that I duplicate one of them, modify and tweak them and them I clone them to the client with clonezila.
came here to post this.
You can also read here
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/commercialize/manufacture/desktop/oem-windows-deployment-and-imaging-walkthrough?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
And here
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dn475741.aspx
The Windows ADK/MDT made ghost obsolete, which is why Symantec dropped support for it. The MDT is officially supported and free. Macrium is just bad. It is end-user software, inappropriate for deployment.
The MDT automates this process. Any hypervisor should work depending upon how much you decide to automate.
I actually created a presentation on deployment concepts and posted it a while back: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/presentations-for-those-interested-in-advancing-their-knowledge-in-it/91080
Direct link: Windows Deployment Overview (Google doc)
Basically, go download the Windows ADK and MDT, read this and this. Then just start building your driver database from the OEM driver sites:
Disclaimer-ish: I created ADKTools as an alternative to the MDT scripts and AriaDeploy, both of which are various levels of broken since I have not been maintaining the projects.
you probably want sysprep. set up a install how you like it (with firefox or whatever) then run sysprep on it. you now have a base system to clone to however many drives you need.