Windows 7 Create A Windows 7 Image

iceman

New Member
Morning All
I'm looking for a little help, i have been asked to create an image on windows 7 that will be deployed through the company i work for, but installed at the suppliers end then shipped to the end user directly.
I have created the image which is ready to go and will be using Ghost to create the master image, I have prepared a answer file using WAIK which has the VLK. To validate the licence key i need to setup a KMS (which i have never done) which i guess the machines will validate the licence key through instead of using the internet. However i do have 2 questions reagrding this,
1) How does the OS once it has been ghosted onto the new computer, know if must validate the licence key to a KMS and not directly to Microsoft on the internet?
2) What happens if a user if not on our network and is unable to see the KMS
Any help would be great
Stu

PS: are there any sites for help in setting up the KMS
 
Try searching in the General section I think there was a similar discussion on this there recently.
Joe
 
Are you cloneing / ghosting a drive then putting it into another computer? Won't the different hardware/drivers and the activation failure because the bios is different cause a ton of nightmares?
 
Morning All
I'm looking for a little help, i have been asked to create an image on windows 7 that will be deployed through the company i work for, but installed at the suppliers end then shipped to the end user directly.
I have created the image which is ready to go and will be using Ghost to create the master image, I have prepared a answer file using WAIK which has the VLK. To validate the licence key i need to setup a KMS (which i have never done) which i guess the machines will validate the licence key through instead of using the internet. However i do have 2 questions reagrding this,
1) How does the OS once it has been ghosted onto the new computer, know if must validate the licence key to a KMS and not directly to Microsoft on the internet?
2) What happens if a user if not on our network and is unable to see the KMS
Any help would be great
Stu

PS: are there any sites for help in setting up the KMS

This may help:

Windows Volume Activation | Guide List | Vista & Windows Server 2008
 
Hi There
This image will be used on the same type of laptop (Hardware identical) but on many of them, i have used ghost and the following

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Then took an image of the laptop, but when i ghost the image back i get inaccessible_boot_device

Would it be easier for me to use imageX ? i have always used ghost previously even for Vista, if imagex is the way to do then does someone have some simple instructions on how to once you have create a master image you want to use.


Cheers
Stu
 
Hi There
This image will be used on the same type of laptop (Hardware identical) but on many of them, i have used ghost and the following

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Then took an image of the laptop, but when i ghost the image back i get inaccessible_boot_device

Would it be easier for me to use imageX ? i have always used ghost previously even for Vista, if imagex is the way to do then does someone have some simple instructions on how to once you have create a master image you want to use.

Cheers
Stu


Consider this... I made a clone of my drive.... tested it.. used it.. all was fine. I backed up changed , day to day working files to the clone to keep it updated... all was fine... then one day I tested to see if I could use xcopy and start at the root folder and copy everything that had been modified to the clone.

When xcopy saw my primary OS had a new bcd file.. (because I had modified my multi-boot menu on my primary drive) it overwrote the one on my backup clone.

Next time I tried to boot into my backup clone... guess what?

It behaved EXACTLY like my primary os drive bootmanager. It would only boot into my primary drive. I even took out my primary drive then it still wouldn't boot in to the clone... just gives a nasty error message because the drive was not found.


When you run bcdedit with no parameters it shows the unique guid numbers for specific drives if you put the bcd file on other drives it still tries to boot to the drive that matches the unique guid number.

Moral of the story is that Cloning / ghosting software has to correctly fix the bcd data to boot into the clone drive and changing it will cause unpredicitable results... or putting the clone / image on another hard drive carries specific data, unique to the drive the clone was created on.

For this reason... a "master clone" should fail ... until you install the drive and boot from USB or Dvd... go to the command prompt and run these three commands to correct/rebuild the bootmanager files

bootrec.exe /fixMbr

bootrec.exe /FixBoot

bootrec.exe /rebuildbck

You may not need all three but at least one of them makes the necessary corrections.

Keep in mind that I'm just guessing based on speculation.
 
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