Altiris and HIIS

I have reciently installed HIIS and after fixing the service crashing problem by install Maintenance Pack 1, I was able to collect lots of driver files.

I have gotten Altiris/HIIS to successfully inject an image with drivers, join the domain do all this from PXE booting.

So I went back to make a very clean, with no drivers installed image to base my entire organziation's machines on. I only installed a NIC driver becaused I needed to add domain groups to the local image as well as install the Altiris client. At the end, I use sysprep.inf (attached) as generated by HIIS to prep the image, then use winpe/ghost to gather the images, finally placing it on my express share.

Problem 1. Upon imaging the computer with the image mentioned above, it tries to find the nic driver inside c:\windows\inf instead of from the injected driver store. I have fixed this by deleting oem0.inf from c:\windows\inf.

Problem 2. The computer does not join the domain even though all the drivers are injected. When the machine comes up, I logon locally, look in device manager to see a bunch of ! (bangs). These bangs immediatly change to "happy" driver installs and then everything works fine. But it's not until I logon locally that they install properly.

If I gather the image again, all those drivers are now inbedded and so there is no problem next time, for that model. This is not acceptable since I am trying to get away from making an image for each model computer.

Why the heck doesn't HIIS utilize the built in oemdriverspath option in sysprep instead of using it's own inject executable to do this is beyond me.

When I'm done, I would like to boot a new model computer using the manufacturer's install of XP, gather the drivers from that machine (or add some drag/drop ones). Then use my generic image with HIIS to get all of the new computers up and running with my volume license edition of XP.