forum.opsi.org

A home user I support had a broken hard drive (in computer1). Of course he lived a bit too far away to come and reinstall opsi locally. So I brought a hard drive to him, which I installed on a different computer (computer2).
I had to copy all the drivers for computer1 on the drive that was temporarily installed in computer2. I also had to change the opsi key, otherwise it would not work at all with the drive back in computer1.

I might encounter this scenario again, but with a company computer. We have a few people outsourced, who also take their computer with them. Sometimes this is a desktop, because of the system requirements. When something breaks it would be preferable to fix it the quickest way possible. It doesn't look very professional when they first have to haul their computer away, back to home base, to fix it.

Maybe something can be done with OPSI so this can be made easier?

Hi,

you usually want to set the Windows on that machine into something like a sysprep-like mode.

We redistribute images in such state with the wim-capture-extension BUT in it we still rely on having the computer locally.
Still it might get you an idea on how to do things.


Kind regards

Niko

Hi,

for this reason we have implemented the winpenetworkmode. Without this method you don't need a connection during the windows installation. This can be used, to install the machine. It is possible to build a ISO with our bootimage and your windows installation, the only thing that you need is the correct drivers for that computer. So if you have inventory data from this pc in your opsi-Database, then you can write a small script, that will fetch the drivers for this clients. If your ISO is not so big, you can burn this on a DVD, otherwise you can build a bootable usb-Stick. Is a little bit tricky work, but should work fine. If you bring your custumer a new Harddisk, that you can prepare these harddrive with another computer, till the point, where the installation after a reboot will start with the winpe-Boot. If you can cut at this point, you have an harddisk, that will fullfill your requirement.

We have had the same issue and have implemented the one time passord. The idea was, that we don't need to communicate with the user to exchange the long opsi-Hostkey. If you have an machine with internet connection, then you can boot this client from an usb-Stick and Install the software on the old way. But for that you need a opsi-Server, that can be connected in any way from the user and it will took some time. I would prefer to build a own recovery medium like I have described before.