Comments on: No more HAL-hell, the implications of Windows Vista’s hardware independent imaging technology

By: ATXStables

ATXStables — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 03:51:56 +0000

Although i would like to use this on Windows VISTA and Windows 7, our company decided to hold off.

Regarding the posts about XP, consider the following when using the Windows AIK Toolkit:

- Windows XP can be Hardware Indepenent Imaged(HII) for FREE with the Windows AIK toolkit which can be downloaded from Microsoft.

- Windows XP HII is elusive and can be a bit tricky to get past Blue Screens. We support a user base of about 650 users and thousands of servers in the field. Our tests of HII show that the biggest hurdle to overcome imaging is the disk drivers and HAL.

- In your HII, you can change the disk drivers to Standard Dual Channel IDE and this will suffice for any servers or desktops. Even if the machine is a SATA machine the machine will boot. If you receive the infamous stop 0×000007b error it means that your bios has SATA enabled. Change the SATA to IDE in your bios, reboot and it will boot to windows. Once in windows, install the correct boot disk drivers, change the BIOS back to SATA and all is well. This was a terrifically large hurdle that took quite some time to solve and is most evident in the Dell T3400 and TXX towers.

- Also, you can change the HAL on the fly in Windows XP. When preparing your HII, you should change this to AICP HAL. Go ahead and just do it, it will work 95% of the time. Our labs show that it did not work on HP laptops, so another image was required. i.e. Go into device manager and expand the computer icon, click on update driver, answer no to connect to the Internet and will select from a list. Change to AICP HAL. OK, so that worked but guess what? If you have a hyperthreaded machine such as a dual core proc after you drop the image down you will need to change the HAL to a dual proc. So change it on the fly after the image is installed.

- There is also another website that gives you cookbook instructions and alot of other information. Try appdeploy.com

By: Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:46:35 +0000

rolf, Vista will run fine with at least 2GB

By: rolf

rolf — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:28:37 +0000

That is great.
It is funny how the great things Microsoft do are mostly never advertized
Im really glad to hear that. Im gonna go vista asap, so that I dont have to maintain half a dozen XP images. And being able to have the master image in a virtual machine is great too!!
Thanks for the news.
I just hope Vista will run properly on some of the old hardware we have. I hear its a bit resource intensive.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:49:39 +0000

John, please check out my reply to Phil here.

By: John

John — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:35:39 +0000

Sorry,
but I cannot understand the point.
Since you talk about deployment (i.e. applying a pre made image to different hardware through cloning/imaging) you do like this (I have been doing with XP since several years):
- Install OS (XP, Vista, ..) on hw (or VM)
- Customize it (install apps, tools, …)
- Add extra drivers not natively supported (video cards, net adapters,…)
- Sysprep the machine
- Clone

Upon the bootup, clones will redetect hal, regenrate SIDs, …

I am missing something on your “vision” (a part that vista deployment does this for you): before it was not impossible nor difficult, no ????

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:59:24 +0000

Paris, hardware independent imaging is something Microsoft has already fixed. I don’t even want to know how much time we wasted with XP which doesn’t support it.

By: Paris

Paris — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:07:10 +0000

I agree, the deployment tools, hardware independant imaging, and image management tools (SIM) are fantastic. Bravo Microsoft. Now can you please fix Vista?!

By: IT Blogwatch

IT Blogwatch — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:52:39 +0000

AOLers fall on swords (and browser choices)…

You’re fired! It’s IT Blogwatch, in which AOL’s CTO and others “resign” over its earlier privacy breach. Not to mention what your choice of browser says about you……

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:21:05 +0000

You’re right, this might be another interesting feature. If you buy a new computer, you could move the hard disk of your old computer into the new one. This way, you don’t have to install and configure your system again. However, I am not sure if this works without imaging.

By: AniMatrix

AniMatrix — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:30:03 +0000

Hi,

When I was on college (still am, another one) we had a SWAP Drive, a removable hard disk.

So when we did our swap drive in the swap thing it boots from that disk. But we had computers with different hardware on college. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it dont. So sometimes we needed to reinstall our hard disk to get back to ‘work’ again because windows was a little messed up and wont boot anymore.

So if this technology was implemented on Windows 2000 we, students, didnt have that problems 6 years ago.

So I think this might be interesting like you said

Nice article.