Plan a PSImage Deployment

PSImage is not supported by FileWave Technical Support. Use this material for educational purposes and do not open Technical Support tickets for PSImage. For setup or customization help, contact professional.services@filewave.com; existing unused Professional Services hours may be available for this work. Use the FileWave Discord community for peer discussion. For FileWave's supported Windows imaging workflow, use Network Imaging / IVS.

Deployment workflow

A PSImage deployment has two required components: an SMB share named psimage and a bootable Windows PE image named boot.wim.

1. Prepare the psimage SMB share and its share and NTFS permissions.
2. Choose one or more ways to start boot.wim on target computers:
   • Deploy it as a Fileset that loads into a RAM disk. This requires a working FileWave Client on the target.
   • Create a bootable USB drive. A single-partition drive starts network imaging and reads images and drivers from the psimage share. A dual-partition drive stores boot.wim, images, and drivers locally. The local method still needs network access after imaging so the FileWave Client can send its first inventory and create the Client record. See Building Your Imaging Environment.
   • Publish boot.wim through a PXE service such as Windows Deployment Services (WDS).
   • Create a bootable ISO. Use it to start a virtual machine for image capture or write it to optical media for older hardware. See Building Your Imaging Environment.
3. Prepare the physical reference computer or virtual machine with prep_ref_vm.ps1, which runs Sysprep.
4. Start the reference computer from the ISO, USB drive, or network and capture the master image.
5. Run upload_driver_pack.ps1 on each computer model whose drivers PSImage must deploy.
6. Add the customized FileWave Client and any optional Kiosk customization.
7. Add a Wi-Fi profile for laptops that do not have a built-in Ethernet adapter.
8. Optionally use image_mappings.txt to preassign images, computer names, and Custom Field values. Without a mapping, the technician is prompted to choose an image and computer name.
9. Start the target computer from USB, PXE, or the Fileset-based RAM disk to restore the image.

Prepare the psimage SMB share

1. Extract PSImage_v0.3.zip to a folder on the file server.
2. Share the folder with the name psimage.
3. Grant Everyone: Full Control at the share-permission layer.
4. Create a dedicated domain account, such as fwadmin, and grant that account Modify NTFS permission on the folder. NTFS permissions provide the effective access restriction for this configuration.
5. From another Windows computer, connect to the psimage share with the dedicated domain account and confirm that it can create, modify, and read a test file.