I have created this blog to record the things I learn as I progress in my studies of the Windows Operating System. My focus will primarily be the latest Operating System offerings by Microsoft, but much of the content below may also apply to earlier versions. I invite you to join me as I explore and learn about Microsoft Windows!
In this final installment of the series, I show how to install a new Windows 7 workstation using the tools and components we've put in place. This final piece leverages our custom .wim file, which we install from the network share where it was placed in the previous video, to build a fully-functioning Windows 7 environment.
The tools we use in this video are:
BCDBOOT - Used to set up a system partition on a computer, or to repair the boot environment within the system partition of a computer. BCDBoot can be run from Windows PE
DISKPART - A Command-line tool that enables disk configuration and management from within a Windows PE environment
IMAGEX - A command-line tool used to capture, modify, and rapidly deploy file-based disk images.
In Part 3 of this series, I'll show you how to take the answer file that we previously created and use it to create a Windows 7 reference machine. This machine will become be base build from which end user machines will be built.
In this video, the following topics are addressed:
Tips and tricks for doing an unattended installation on a Hyper-V virtual machine including:
How to create a virtual device to become the reference machine
How to build a virtual floppy disk (.VFD)
How to use the .VFD to copy the answer file so that it can be used when installing the reference machine
How to verify that your answer file settings were implemented during the unattended install
How to sysprep your reference machine and get it ready to be imaged for use with end users.
Future installations of this series will address how to create bootable WindowsPE media, as well as how to install over the network.
