Jacob Schaer's questions

I just started with MDT2012 recently in hopes of eventually getting away with using Ghost to deploy all of our department computers. When I test deploy in VirtualBox, it deploys the OS properly, but stops because of a network driver failure (it gets the "could not allocate resources" issue).

On physical hardware (Latitude E6500, Optiplex 980, and an older Latitude) it gets through the multicast and stops immediately after with:

"Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information"

I've looked at the logs and never see anything really of note. Originally I was using DriverPacks from DriverPacks.net, but thinking it was a driver issue, I switched over to using Dell's cab driver packs. Still the same issue.

I check and it did the HDD is all fine - it was properly partitioned, set to bootable, and was loaded with all the proper OS installer files.

I'm using a flash drive to do the install - when I make changes to the deployment share I rebuild and copy the ISO to the drive, then use YUMI multiboot to start the ISO (probably irrelevant).

Where I work we deploy a lot of computers to staff and we try to keep them all roughly the same.

Presently we take each new machine type we get, configure it the way we want, and then take an image of it using Norton Ghost. We then deploy this to any other computers that come in.

The problem is that we have to not only do this for each machine, but also manually keep them up to date. Is there a convenient tool for building a relatively hardware independent image that can be updated in a virtual environment?

Ideally build image on virtual machine, use drivers from driver packs to allow deploy on any machine, thus reducing our work to simply fixing the minor driver issues that may come up and changing the computer name.

I know this is a feature of some very large enterprise type software, but I was hoping for a relatively simple solution. If there are several possibilities, I'm mostly looking for some direction - i.e.: keywords to look for, etc.