DL360 G4 RIS Deployment

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi

Anyone out there done a successful RIS deployment of a G4 DL360?

I've been trying for a couple of days to get this working with no success yet - there seems to be a lot of info on unattended installs on these forums but nothing RIS-specific. I've tried using the information for those setups..

First problem I had was getting the NIC drivers to support RIS. I'd added them as Microsoft instruct (to the $OEM$\$1\NIC and I386 folders, and made the changes to ristndrn.sif as instructed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315279/EN-US/). This didn't work, but downloading the 2000 (as opposed to 2003) NIC drivers worked round this.

Second the second stage of setup (text mode?, after the starting windows... prompt) couldn't find the array. Following steps here (http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=728971&admit=-682735245+1126278231077+28353475) got past this... until setup completes, then I get into a BSOD loop (I suspect it's inaccessible_boot_device but it disappears so quick).

Anyone know how to prevent this last problem??? Are there any differences between what is done on unattended installs compared to RIS installs?

Thanks

[Steven Clementi]

Aaron:


Is this the first time your using RIS? or has it worked in the past for you?

If so, maybe you can try RDP. HP's Rapid Deployment Pack used to have some "free demo" licenses that you could use for 7 days or 30 days or something similar to that.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/rdp/index.html

RDP is a free download and it works great (for most users).


Now, I believe RIS uses that same unattended process to remotely install the OS. All it really does is just pass the unattend.txt file to the remote system with the source files and the remote system does everything. Theoreticaly, RIS and RDP should work exactly the same when it comes to an unattended install, the only exception being how the remote system gets the necessary files.

First thing I would do is double check your setup files, make sure all the driver references are in the correct places and that all the needed drivers are in the right place, check for typo's, etc... You probably did this already... 4 times probably.


Steven

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi Steven

Thanks for the response - yes, I've checked everything time and time again... Last night I found this post:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=732779

Which looks promising, so I'll try that when I'm nex twith the customer.

With regards to RDP I have used it and liked it, however there's an issue around getting it paid for on this project and I really need it to work long term past the trial (I know it's not expensive, I'm sure we will use it in future). It's a Citrix deployment so will almost definately involve reimaging fairly frequently.

Aaron