Silent install of the WAIK fails with error – “Please insert the disk: Windows Automation Installation Kit CD”

This error message only seems to occur when the 64-bit version of the WAIK is installed off read-only media (such as an ISO image).

It appears that this is caused by an entry in the Media table of the wAIKAMD64.msi file. The MSI is looking for a embedded cab file that is actually external.

There are three ways to ‘fix this’;

1. Copy the source onto a writable hard disk and then run the MSI.
2. Make sure that your CD ISO image is called ‘KB3AIK_EN’. This is the volume name the MSI is looking for.
3. Create an MST file that alters the ‘Media’ table. Change the line for the ‘WinPE.Cab’ cabinet so that the ‘VolumeLabel’ field is set to “DEFAULT” instead of “KB3AIK_EN”. This is my preferred option.

Hope this helps.

Windows 7 Redirected Folders with Offline Files caching failing to reconnect after Laptop hibernation

A big thanks to the support guys at Microsoft for resolving this one!

The scenario;

Windows 7 clients with folder redirection enabled via Group Policy to a remote file and print server. Offline folders have been enabled.

A common file share has been employed to form the base of the user folder structure. The share NTFS permissions are set to disallow end users to browse the other end user folders.

A provisioning script was written that does the following;

1. Create the folder structure for the end user.
2. Set the end user as the owner of each folder.
3. Set permissions to the folder structure so that only the end user and the helpdesk has access to the folder structure.

Setup Error when installing KMS on Windows 2003

When attempting to install KMS onto a Windows 2003 SP2 x86 server, I received a ‘Setup Error’ when running the command line ‘KMSW2K3.exe /l:c:\kmsinst.log’.

The installation then failed and rolled back without any further explanation.
Even the log file failed to shed any real light on the problem.

Turns out that I had to re-register my WMI components!

The following commands came from this link.

They are;

cd /d %windir%\system32\wbem
for %i in (*.dll) do RegSvr32 -s %i
for %i in (*.exe) do %i /RegServer

Obscure, but may hopefully help someone!

Getting Lenovo drivers into SCCM – The easy way

The current manual process for obtaining all drivers for a model of Lenovo laptop is;

• Browse the Lenovo website
• Download each individual driver
• Extract the driver
• Import it into SCCM.

MDT Error: “Media Not Found”

This error came up when I attempted to boot a PC with a Windows PE boot disk I created using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 Update 1 (MDT).

When the lite touch script attempted to run, it bombed out with the following message;

Title: ” Media not found “
Message: “Please insert the CD, DVD or USB to complete the deployment process.”.

Turns out that this is because a MININT directory still exists on the hard drive of the target PC.

By simply reformatting the drive from the Administrator prompt using ‘format c: /fs:ntfs /q’ and then rebooting back into Windows PE again, the problem was resolved.

I presume that this will apply to MDT 2010 as well.

Richard

Missing Network Card when booting a MDT 2008 WinPE image within VMWare.

As per usual, make sure that you back everything up before making changes to your system. I am not responsible for your stuff ups!

I was attempting to deploy an image created with MDT 2008 (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) to a VMWare virtual machine. After PXE booting my WIM image, Windows PE did not have a network card present that could talk to the deployment server (It worked first time using Citrix XenServer!)

Here is my test environment;

I have created two virtual machines on a test VMWare ESXi box.
VM One has Windows 2003, MDT 2008 and Windows Deployment Services.

VM Two is the VM I am attempting to build via MDT installed on VM one.

After mucking around with injecting the vmware drivers, changing the network card type and recreating WIM’s ad infinitum, I found out the the VMX file for the test VM was missing a couple of essential entries.

Adding the following lines worked for me;
ethernet0.startConnected = “true”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
ethernet0.addressType = “generated”

I made the changes, uploaded them using the data store browser, started the VM, and voila!

Citrix XenApp streaming client error: Office 2007

Whilst attempting to stream Office 2007 from a test Citrix box to a desktop, I encountered this bizarre error.

Unable to find a suitable version for your operating system/language/boot drive (0xE000192)

The target was correct (The same VM had previously been used to create the profile).

After some digging around, I found an article on Citrix’s web site that appeared to explain the problem.
Click here for Article.

It turns out that the real time scanner of the Anti-Virus (In this case McAfee) on the XenApp server was attempting to scan the cab file when the streaming plugin was trying to access the profile.

The cab file in this case is around 950MB and so takes some time to scan, by which time the streaming plugin has given up.

When the real time scanner was disabled (A temporary measure until the anti-virus policy is updated!!), the streaming of Office 2007 finished correctly.

It is also worth looking at the article about switching on debugging for the Streaming plugin which can be found here.

Cheers

Richard

Clearing Okular’s Recent Files List

Okular is the new PDF reader for KDE 4. It is also capable of displaying DjVu and CHM files.

One anomaly is that there is no option to clear the list of recently opened documents from the menu. Even clearing the most recently used list from the KDE 4 Menu does not clear the list within Okular.

It comes down to having to manually edit a file. The file in question can be found in your home directory.

Using my PC as an example, the file can be found at;

/home/Richard/.kde/share/config/okularrc

Close Okular first. Edit this file and delete the lines under [Recent Files]. Save the file, then restart Okular.

If anyone knows an easier way to achieve this, please let me know!

VMWare Workstation – Resizing hard disks

Disclaimer: Back up your data first!  Do not attempt to re-size hard disks or partitions unless you have a reliable backup of your virtual machine.  I will not accept liability for your stuff ups!

It’s nice to know that you can do this under VMware Workstation as well as with VMware server.

I had a virtual machine originally being used as a test environment.  This VM became so useful, I thought that rather than re-create a production version I would simply increase the hard disk size and memory allocation.

Sound support for Flash in Fedora 9

After installing the Adobe flash plugin within Firefox on my Fedora 9 box, I could not get the sound to work at all on sites such as YouTube.

A quick google told me that I had to install libflashsupport.

After running ‘yum install libflashsupport‘ , everything was well with the world.  This library allows Pulse Audio to work with flash apparently.

If I can find the original source of this fix, I’ll be sure to update this post with an acknowledgement – They saved me a lot of time!

Cheers