about to wash my hands of this product....

[ikon]

Sorry to hear about the unemployment. I've never been unemployed for more than a couple of weeks, so I can't really relate, but I can imagine it must suck.

[tswalker]

ya, it's been a struggle of ever climbing obstacles, a missed milestone, and me being hard on myself in the pursuit of self-employed independence.... I'll endure.

 

A quote from Yoda says it best... "Do. Or do not. There is no try."

[ikon]

I did the self-employed route for a number of years. After a while, the crazy-long hours, lack of holidays, and having to do every job yourself got to me and I decided employment in a larger organization was a better option.

[jmwills]

crazy-long hours, lack of holidays,

 

Hmmmm, sounds like being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan!

[ikon]

Except those deployments have a defined endpoint, usually measured in months, or sometimes a year or two.

[jmwills]

Yes sir.  But 12 months 12x7x52 is a long time, when you wash rinse and repeat 6 times.

[ikon]

I hear ya. After 10 years of going it alone, I could see no end of it in sight, so I made a change.

[Drashna Jaelre]

reading this, does indicate that it helps simplify it.. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200117.aspx I may revisit that.

 

While I definitely would not intentionally format an installation partition for 64K (because it is a waste), it honestly shouldn't matter in the scheme of things. Why the configuration wizards chokes at that is a mystery to me.

 

For example, say I'm limited to a single partition for this and I know that caching may be critical, I would probably gear the subsystem to use a higher allocation unit to decrease page caching delays and forgo the slight loss in storage capacity due to over allocation. However, if this was reality, I think that system would have bigger fish to fry (so to say) and the point would be moot. just an example.

 

 

ok, so I'm pretty convinced now that the use of unattend.xml and cfg.ini are only for hosted and/or multi-deployment scenarios.

 

The instructions are more clear here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200142.aspx

 

But these lead to generate the unattend, base sysprep (with OOBE instructed to use that unattend), and when combined with cfg.ini and the prep'd base image you can "simplify" the installation procedure. Either automated via your own scripts, web site, or other mechanisms. It is ideal for enterprise environments or labs that may deploy hosted or mulitiple VM or solutions internally, or for external customers as in for OEM setups.. etc. For the hosted VM scenarios, there's more instructions and preps needed found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj730390.aspx

 

I'll more than likely steer clear of all that... At some point, I'll build a decent Hyper-V setup and then perhaps dig into it, but being unemployed stinks... I can't really afford to tinker at that level.

 

 

yeah, that stuff is definitely more for automated deployment, or mass deployment. There is some info on how to prepare for OEM restoration... but it didn't work for me actually.

If you have any questions about that stuff, please do feel free to ask, as I've become an expert on that stuff (been building a customized image, for "XFiles" and other stuff )

 

As for the HyperV, I'd really recommend a sysprepped image, with remote management turned on by default. Or scripted to be enabled by default. Otherwise, same issue (worse even).

 

And I hear you on the unemployment. It sucks. 

[tswalker]

....

If you have any questions about that stuff, please do feel free to ask...

Thanks Drashna, I will probably do just that... haha. I'm looking around my SOHO here and believe I might be able to piece together a lethargic but almost capable hyper-v lab setup (using stuff ~5 years old).

[tswalker]

I really wish Microsoft had a "free" core version of server like they do with Hyper-V Server.. something that could be a VM to run something like TFS express.