(semi) Universal Bootcamp image

[franton]

Hi all,

I *think* i've managed to prepare a (mostly) universal bootcamp winclone image of Windows 7. If i'm successful, how many of you would be interested in how to do it?

[Sonic84]

if your willing to share, sure, I'd like to hear.

[franton]

Good enough for me. It's long and complicated, involves sys prep hell and winclone pro. As soon as I'm happy that what i'm working on ... actually works, i'll tell all.

[anpender]

I am definitely interested as well.

[tls2t]

I'm curious as to what you mean by a "universal image." Could you clarify?

We use software called the Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) to create a hardware-identifier stripped sysprep-ed image, which I can then use to deploy on both PC and Mac (using Winclone). I wish I had found this utility sooner. I can create a Windows build on an old Dell, run the utility, then image it across the board everywhere.

[franton]

sysprep'ped image on Windows 7 Enterprise with the bootcamp drivers integrated and basic menu for the AD bind.

[Sandy]

Yes please!

[franton]

Ok folks, I've posted the guide. It's long, arduous and will make you glad you're an OS X person!

[joemamasmac]

Is there a link to the guide? I have searched but couldn't find it.

Joe

[franton]

To be fair, it's been superseded by a tool called Brigadier. https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier

My old method baked in a cobbled together set of bootcamp drivers. The tool linked above downloads the appropriate drivers from a SUS server and installs them. Just as long as you have ethernet drivers deployed with your Windows image, it'll do the hard bit.

[timsutton]

I'd be interested in hearing more if anyone is using brigadier, and particularly if anyone is running into issues calling the BootCamp MSI during sysprep, as this is currently what Brigadier does.

We have a couple different errors that we run into. One seems to be a benign error due to a race condition and happens about 50% of the time (seems more often on faster hardware) but only when run as a sysprep phase, where the SFX RAR archive is trying to execute all the EULA txt files from a particular package and throws an error when it obviously can't run them. I've seen an alternate approach to installing Boot Camp that involves running it from the SetupComplete.cmd script instead of the oobeSystem pass, but haven't yet had a chance to see whether this changes anything. I don't even know how to try to diagnose such an error when it happens in the middle of the sysprep pass.

Another seems to be caused be a wrong path in a few specific driver packages, and I believe this happens even on a manual install.

If anyone has run into any errors like these and is experienced with debugging/fixing MSI installs and sysprep, feel free to post here or get in touch with me directly, or post an issue to the brigadier project page on GitHub.

[franton]

I'm trying to persuade where I work to go with "brigadier". It'll make life a lot easier. IF we end up going that way (my side of things isn't allowed to deal with bootcamp installs), i'll report whatever I find.

[franton]

Hi Tim,

I'm now running your tool as part of an unattend.xml file that W7 processes after it reboots after a sysprep. Seems to work ok apart from that I can't specify our internal SUS server: I can only use Apple's.

[gersteina1]

Two years later, but... Franton, did you just add a line to the unattend.xml? I stumbled across this and it fits the bill for the dual-boot project I need to start working on.

Thanks!

[franton]

Yes I did. Please see this for more details. It'll point you in the right direction at least.

Most of what's in there is highly out of date so should be used as a reference more than anything else.