Combining multiple images into a single .wim file – Part 2 – Task Sequence
The below information is provided as is, please test and realize you are using this information at your own risk.
This process sadly won’t work with SMS 2003, so until i have it ready to go in my SCCM test environment I cannot verify that this works 100%. However, I did run it by “Microsoft” and my source said it should work just fine in Configuration Manager. Once again, i believe i owe my source a lot of beer. :)
Really, it’s pretty simple. We need to set the TS variable called “OSDImageIndex”.
So we need to create a new Task Sequence step to set a TS variable.
I’m going to call this step “Set Image Index” seems.. clear enough.
The value will be the value of the image index you want to use, 1,2,3 whatever is the index of the image you want to select. Now you can parse this variable a number of ways. You could use a model query, or anything else you can think of. You also will want multiple steps so that can set the various indexes depending on how many images you have in your .wim file.
So for the sake of example, lets keep it simple.
I have a image.wim file i’m going to use that has 3 images in it.
Index 1 – ACPI Windows XP SP3
Index 2 – Advanced ACPI Windows XP SP3
Index 3 – Windows XP SP3 Tablet
Lets create a model query for a HP NC6000 notebook, which i know is a Advanced ACPI hardware device. I need to set my TS variable value to “2”, so that i select my Advanced ACPI image from my .wim file. If i’m not deploying to a HP NC6000, then the default “1” is just fine and dandy.
Now I need to create a model query so that this step will only run for my HP NC6000.
Here is my WMI Query for the NC6000, i use the %…% so i don’t have to worry about the various HP Part #’s, if you have any HP devices, you know what i’m talking about.
Now i have my query, so when my TS runs, it will detect that i have a HP NC6000 laptop based on my query, and set my image index to the appropriate image. If i don’t have a HP NC6000 laptop, then it will use the first index and i’m still good to go.
I haven’t thought a clever way to identify the tablet models quite yet, i could use a model query, but i think i can come up with something more clever, so once i do, i will add that to this post. I was thinking about using something along the lines of the %istablet% custom query that you can do in customsettings.ini but i need to think on it for awhile.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.
-Chris