Today I decided I needed to reinstall my laptop again.  Even Outlook for Web Access was crashing.  To ensure that it wasn't too trivial, I decided to use Windows Remote Installation Services (RIS).

After following the instructions at KB325862 I booted my Virtual Machine (VMWare Workstation 5.5 Beta).  I selected F12 for network boot and then waited.  This produced the following error:

VXE-E53:  No boot filename received

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Operating System not found

After wrestling with it for a while I ended up getting some help from Rohan Bhalla.  The solution was to go to the DHCP server and set the Scope Options for:

066 Boot Server Host Name = IP address of my RIS server and
067 Bootfile Name = OSchooser\i386\startrom.com.

Makes sense but since RIS interacts with DHCP, why were these settings not done automagically when I installed RIS?

Another issue I encountered was that that network drivers included with the Windows installation were painfully slow.  It took all night to install Windows on my first attempt.  To fix this I updated the Windows image with the VMX network drivers (vmware-nic.inf, vmxnet.inf, and vmxnet.sys) from the VMWare iso file (Windows.iso) that is used to install the VMWare tools onto the guest OS.

Now I am enamored with RIS.  I can't believe I have gone so long without it.  To create a custom Windows install all you do is place a different *.SIF file into the templates directory of your image.  This allows one to replace (or modify) the defualt ristndrd.sif file so that it no longer formats the drive before installing.  Sweet!

Here are some screen shots:

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:57:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Computer Related