IT Dribble

After a colleague of mine installed WDS at a client site they found that certain laptops and desktop PCs would not be able to pick up the images that have been captured.

The problem lies in the HAL Type of the PC that was captured and then WDS finds the HAL type for the PC asking for an image and if one doesn’t match then you will most probably get the error: “There are no images available”

My scenario was that we had a generic image built and working for Single CPU and MultiCPU PCs but only the Multiple / Newer PCs could see the image in WDS – that is because the HAL type was “Advanced Configuration and power interface (ACPI) PC” but these older PCs were being recognised as Uniprocessor HAL Types.

The solution: Get the image onto the Older PC type (via Ghost or Clonezilla etc) login to the system. Download DevCon and extract into C:\Windows or any other %PATH% variable you like.
Then run:
devcon sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +acpiapic_up !acpiapic_mp
devcon update c:\windows\inf\hal.inf acpiapic_up

Reboot and Login two times then Sysprep and capture again!

Hopefully your good to go!

Reference: http://www.ngohq.com/processors/11891-how-to-update-the-hal-without-reinstalling-windows.html

Keywords: WDS, Force HALs, Force HAL, Windows Deployment Services, WDS, ACPI Multiprocessor PC, acpiapic_up, acpiapic_mp, No Images after Capture, Change HAL Type

Can’t open this item. The text formatting command is not available – Outlook. This error was received when trying to open an Outlook item. Also it seems that Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) couldn’t render a page and it would just be blank. After trying to remove profiles and repair office etc I traced the fault to a recent Windows update KB978207 for IE to be exact. After removing the update and rebooted everything worked again!

By using Sysinternals PSEXEC I installed Visio remotely unattended.

Copy the visio files to the PC in question
Edit the setup.ini file for visio located in files\setup\setup.ini add:

[Options]
; The option section is used for specifying individual Installer Properties.
USERNAME=Your Name
COMPANYNAME=Your Company

Then fire up a command prompt and execute command:

PSEXEC \\PCNAME -S -E -I MSIEXEC /PASSIVE /QB /I C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI PIDKEY=12345abcde98765zyxwv34567

PCNAME Being the name of the remote PC
C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI being the path to the VISSTD.MSI package
12345abcde98765zyxwv34567 being your Visio license key