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Building a Windows XP Image in BDD 2007 Part 2

This post will go over adding an XP WIM image to your BDD 2007 server and installing XP from a WIM based build.

First make sure that your Windows XP was properly installed.

BDD will bring your through the basic install launched from the GUI.

Next you will see the text based installation:

Finally the GUI setup portion will commence.

BDD Light touch wizard will execute the tasks specified in the build Tasks tab.

Sysprep will run on the workstation once all the tasks are completed. This may take a while. Also I have noticed a small bug where you sometimes have to manually set the current window context to the System Management Server dialog box. If you notice it’s taking a long really long time (30 minutes +) Just click in the Window.

The computer will then reboot into WinPE and capture the image to the capture share on the BDD server.

If you open the Distribution folder on your BDD server and browse to Captures you can see the newly created WIM Image.

The first step to deploying Windows XP with a WIM image is to add it to the operating systems in BDD.

Click Operating Systems

in the actions pane click new.

In the first New OS Wizard panel choose the “Custom Image File” option. and click “Next”

In the next panel, Click Browse and choose the wim image found in the Captures folder. If you want to move the image file when you integrate it check the Move Check box. Click “Next”

Choose “Setup files are not needed” Click “Next”

Change the destination directory name should it be necessary, then click Copy, or Move if you’re moving the file.

You should now see the Windows XP based WIM image in your Operating systems details pane.

Now we need to create a new build for the WIM based Windows XP.

Click Builds

in the actions pane click new.

Provide a Build ID, Build Name, and Build comments Click Next

Enter in the proper product VLK product KEY. Click Next

Enter the Full Name, Organization and IE home page desired. Click Next.

Enter a local admin password. Click Create.

This will create a new Build based on the WIM image. Before moving forward. There is one point that should be made. Because the WIM image is an image of a syspreped Windows XP, The first time we boot up a workstation that we applied the image to the workstation will run the Mini Setup mode. This mode is a special GUI only mode of Windows Setup. By using the WIM image we can skip a large portion of the Windows XP install process. The only thing we need to keep in mind is that the setup process that kicks off during the Mini setup is not automated by the unattend.txt file. It is driven by the Sysprep.inf. This is important to note because BDD cannot alter the setup process that takes place in the mini-setup, so your only way to customize that part if the installation is to use the Sysprep.inf file. (Going back to the example we used in the first bdd article you may need to modify this file if your using certain SATA drivers).

Finally because we are deploying Windows XP we need to re-insert the WinPE 2.0 fix we saw in the first article into the task lists. This will again ensure that the partitioning is done correctly.

That’s it! We can now deploy Windows XP using the WIM image. Following the same procedure we used in part 1 you can test the installation of the new WIM image.

Now for those who are still not quite sure what we did here I made a simple flow diagram to illustrate what is going on.

The first part of the excorsise we performed the following steps: (Building a Windows Image in BDD 2007 Part 1)

Next we deployed the WIM:

As you can see BDD uses the same steps for deploying and capturing images or just deploying images. The recommended approach for building your images is to build them up in an iterative process. When we create the WIM image we are still using the same process to build a Windows XP image, however we jump into the workflow at a much later point in the installation process. (about the half way point of the GUI Based install during a regular installation) This provides a much faster way to build a new base image, or to deploy an already customized image. With Driver Injection you can even use the WIM image for most situations where you would need to create a new image to accomodate new hardware.

Let me know what you think of this BDD guidance. Post in the forums, or leave me a comment. If there is a particular element you want to know about in regards to BDD, or any topic for that matter just let me know!