Hi all thanks,
I will try booting with a USB Stick, I have a machine with 4GB I am testing on at the moment.
As for where you guys are getting stuck I will try explain the whole situation (I kept it short to prevent a massive post).
Situation:
We have 3 departments in my office, The lab (me and my manager), The office (the Boss and a salesman) and Forensics (a Forensic analyst).
Each have a certain set of requirements for their daily operations to run and need the ability to wipe their machines and build a new one from scratch with as little down time as possible.
Environment:
The Lab is mostly fixed with all the major cd/floppy/usb boot devices placed on the PXE server for live booting to do; wipes, clones, disk checks etc.
However we have a total of 11 Windows based computers between the 5 of us that require Images.
- The Lab and Forensics require 1 standard image (each) which needs to be customized each time we get a new application for data recovery.
- The office require 2 standard images: 1 For data checking (which needs to meet the same standard as the above) and 1 for regular business use which can just be cloned once and forgotten.
Requirements:
So to sum it up:
- 5 Lab PC's require 1 image, which must be customizable on the fly for limited down time.
- 2 Forensic PC's require 1 image, which must be customizable on the fly for limited down time.
- 2 Office PC's require 1 image, which must be customizable on the fly for limited down time.
- 2 Office PC's require 1 basic windows image.
Issue:
When I start my test computer up I press F8 to go into the PXE menu.
This is from my linux server with SysLinux installed, using DNSMASQ and TFTPD-HPA
All of the deployments work for the non windows based systems
I then go to my windows deployment option and select it. It loads into iPXE from the HTTP portal using wimboot.
It goes through the initialization steps and then loads into a command prompt with "wpeinit" under the title "X:\Windows\System32\"
This is where I am stuck.
Yes I do understand that the shell won't do anything on it's own, however it tries to start wpeinit but then nothing happens. What I am needing to understand is what I am missing for the OS to install?
I understand in startnet.cmd I can type commands to automatically get them in the cmd but I don't know what commands to be typing.