Mark Minasi published his February newsletter over the weekend. Mark is continuing his current them of working with WAIK by having a look at how you can use WinPE to capture and deploy a Vista PC using the ImageX command. This works just like you would work with Ghost, but with some expcetopns as Mark notes:
- It isn’t destructive.
- It is folder/file based and not sector based like Ghost.
Mark also mentions that you can deploy XP and Windows 2003 with this method. This is true. I actually have an example of it being done via WDS in my WDS whitepaper.
You can use Mark’s method to also access devices over the network. This will require network card drivers to be added. Mass storage drivers will also needed to be added. I’ve previously blogged how to update a WinPE image to add network card drivers for a VMware VM and how to add storage drivers for a HP DL380 – don;t worry about these being a server or a VM because the comands are the same … just get your hands on the right drivers first and secondly make sure you decompress them correctly to get at the folder with the INF file that is usually required by plug and play.
Check out Mark’s article and you will learn something useful.
Credit: Mark Minasi.