ZENWorks Imaging Project, part ??
Uh, part three, part four? How long have I been doing this?
Well, anyway, we hit a snag Monday. Our goal, of course, is to have a single base Windows XP image for all our systems, adding only smaller images for things like the Novell Client and machine specific drivers. We got really close on Friday when I discovered the Hardware Abstraction Layer, as contained in hal.dll. It seemed to be the key. So, I pull hall.dll for an XP laptop and make a little ZENWorks image of just that. Now, it’s time to test. I take our base image, which was made on a regular workstation, and slap it on a workstation. I follow that with the specific image for the laptop drivers and boot loader files. Then, I pop on the HAL image and follow it up with the ACU (Automatic Client Updater) image. I reboot and….. Ka-Pow! I have a working laptop! Yea!!
Then, on Monday, we tried it again using FAT32 instead of NTFS. Why, you ask? Well, because if a drive goes bad, FAT32 is a lot easier to recover enough to salvage data. At least, in theory. Want to guess what happened? The Amazing Blue Screen of Death! Okay, so now I’m questioning my own sanity and trying to figure out what I did differently on Friday, but I’ve slept twice since then, so I needed help. My partner in crime, and system administration, suggests that we do it all over again, but with the NTFS images instead. Blamo! It WORKED!
So, today, it’s another round of testing and experimenting to try and get the process to work with FAT32. Fun!
