Building your Windows 7 Image with a VM and RAID
Several users have asked experienced or encountered not finding the system drive to deploy to because of the use of a RAID card. The question typically asked is:
- When booting off a thumb drive to capture an image off a system, the system was unable to see the drives attached to the RAID card. How do I create my image when I can't see my drives?
The reason this happens is because the drivers for the RAID card are probably not in the Windows Pre-installation Environment, (also known as Windows PE and WinPE) for the USB Key originally built. Here are some solutions to try:
- One solution is in order for the system to support that card, the USB Key can be rebuilt on a system with that RAID card already installed.
- Another solution is to inject the drivers for the RAID card into the WinPE on the USB Key. There are some backend switches that could help with this as well. The drivers for the RAID card would need to be INF installable.
The ImageAssist installer can run with an “/add_drivers” switch which will create a folder in the install directory "__Additional_Drivers__". Drivers from this folder will be installed by the WinPE creating tools listed below:
- USB Creator Tool
- Auto Capture Prep Tool
- DVD Restore Architect
Lastly as a 3rd solution, creating a VM with the image needed or capturing the image using a VM solution like VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox, Windows Hyper-V or VMWare Player would work as well. For demonstration purposes, below we have instructions to follow using VMWare Workstation as an example:
1. Creating the Virtual Machine.
Click next after your settings are set.
2. Selecting VM features and size.
3. Selecting the Operating System, System Name and Location.
4. Setting the VM to boot to BIOS and number of processors.
5. Select the amount of RAM and Network type for the VM.
5. Selecting I/O Controller and and Disk type.
7. Creating a Virtual disk and Capacity.
8. Specify disk file location and create the Virtual Machine.
9. Upon VM build completion, edit VM settings.
10. Setting up the Virtual Machine to boot to BIOS
11. Finally, booting to the O/S and formatting the drive.
