Deployment Solution

Hello All,

I'm currently stumped on a problem that i just recently ran across while building a new image for my company.  Let me run through the steps of my image creation and then let me conclude with the problem i am having.  

I started by building the base of the image using Windows 7 x64 Enterprise Edition. I installed all software required by my company, (MS Office, Adobe Flash, Acrobat, Java.

From there i installed the altiris agent on the system so that it can update itself to the current patch level.  After that i installed the automation partition on the computer.  

I removed the altiris agent from the computer using the /clean command and deleted the registry entries and the program file entries. the machine GUID is completely off the system 

I superposed the system and and included a script to install a fresh altiris agent as a first run command.

On first boot after sysprep everything runs smoothly and the new agent is installed.  After all agents including the deployment agent is installed I can send several task including a regalia "reboot" command to it, but when i send "Reboot to Automation" Command it fails with error 1.  The automation partition is still there and I can manually boot to it on restart by selecting it in the boot menu.  

What am i missing, I've tried reinstalling the automation partition through policy and it installs with no issues.  But it still wont reboot to automation.

Any Suggestions?

First question is, why did you remove the agent before capturing the image?  This is un-necessary.  If you run the "prepare for image capture" task, it will run Sysprep for you, and prepare the agent by removing the GUID.

Second, don't use /Clean to pull off an agent.  Use the Uninstall on the EXE instead of using the util.

Finally, I'm not sure why, but it "sounds" like it doesn't recognize the changes that include the automation partition.  You might be able to look at the agent logs to tell a bit more about where that -1 came from.

I guess, you have removed agent from OS to make sure latest version of agent will get installed on firest boot.

Then why are you keeping automation folder ? Automation folder also contain agent and DS binaries. If you will install agent of one version and automation folder of other version then you could have issues.

Better way could be, don't install agent and automation folder. Include your custom script. boot machine to PXE and then perform Imaging.