Imaging Windows from a USB Drive
What
Occasionally you might run into an issue with PXE boot for imaging, or just generally need to test the imaging process. The USB bootable image provided here is meant to be a workaround, or a tool of convenience, for imaging devices using the FileWave IVS.
Please note that FileWave 15.5.0 changed the process to mount a share and this article will need to be adjusted. If you depend on this process of imaging from USB please know that some updates are needed to how the USB config will need to be due to a VPN connection being used to secure the NFS mounts as of 15.5.0.
When/Why
There are several situations where this utility may be useful. A few examples follow:
- You are not sure broadcast forwarding is setup correctly (network troubleshooting)
- Your need to image a device at a location which does not have an IVS locally
- For deeper access to debugging imaging problems
- You can't PXE boot on a physical connection (i.e. a non-PXE supporting dongle)
- You need to image over a w-fi connection
How
Using this utility is in two parts:
- Building the USB drive
- We recommend using Rufus to write this image file to your USB drive. (Note that this is a destructive process for your USB drive)
- Imaging the device. Once you have the drive built, you will attach it to the device to be imaged, and:
- Boot up to BIOS as you would for PXE based imaging
- Choose to boot off of the bootable USB drive you attached (each BIOS will be different regarding how to do this)
- Once booted, the Linux kernel will ask you for the address of your IVS...you can enter the IP or the FQDN if you have one set.
- All things being equal, the device will now read all settings dynamically from the IVS and begin imaging your device
- Note that there is minimal error trapping with this particular setup
- All other requirements like an image being assigned to the mac address, the association being enabled, etc. still hold
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