Help imaging with sysprep across different HAL's

[1vadens]

I have a Lenovo T500 laptop that I am building an image on. My intent is to build a golden image for deployment across different model workstations with different hardware. I was wondering what the implications would be with regard to deploying in this manner. On the Lenovo that I am Building the image on, it has biometric software and a few other hardware specific apps. How do I work with these applications when building a golden image?

 

[cluberti]

You should be building your base image in a virtual machine - Microsoft recommends Hyper-V or Virtual PC, although you can also get a very generic build on VMWare workstation (*not* ESX) and VirtualBox as well. Model-specific drivers and driver packages should be installed JIT during deployment, not as a part of the image. You only want to put things in the base image (driver-wise) that absolutely positively won't install otherwise - those sorts of things are usually unsigned drivers.