Post date: Sep 26, 2010 7:34:15 PM
If you've ever made images of Windows before you know that one of the biggest headaches is the need to make one image for Intel based systems, and another image for AMD based systems. If you put the image for one on the hardware of the other you end up getting a Blue Screen of Death at every boot.
One thing you'll figure out about me after reading a few posts is that I like to do all the complicated stuff on the back end and make things stupid easy for whoever actually has to deploy the image. With that in mind I set out to make one image that would boot on either system. My search eventually led me here: http://blog.doylenet.net/?p=91
The author is brilliant in that his stuff really works, both for Windows XP and Windows 7. I don't see any reason to restate all his stuff here, you can read it for yourself, but I will post some of the files and such that I use to make it work. The checkforintel.txt file should really be a vbs file as discussed on sys admin blog. In fact, I think it may be a word for word copy. As for the sysprep.txt, it should be sysprep.bat. It has been modified though, to work with Windows 7 and to work with MySysprep2.
Basically, rather than running MySysprep2 or sysprep you would run sysprep.bat instead. That will setup your image to go either way. The catch is that you also need to do a little cleanup after the image and that's where checkforintel.vbs comes in. It needs to be run on all PC after they receive an image. You basically have two options for that, automated or manual.
To automate the process your best option is to sneak it in as a task for your unattend.xml.
If you're okay with manual you just need to remember to run the script once during your post imaging build process.
If you're crazy you could even try and push it via Group Policy or SMS.