This section provides information and alternative solutions for known problems and limitations of the Toolkit.
The Toolkit uses the Microsoft Windows Imagex.exe utility during the generation of the Windows PE ISO. The Imagex.exe utility will fail during the creation of the deployment scenario if the Toolkit is installed to a mapped network drive or a USB device if it is formatted with anything other than the NTFS file system.
When you perform a Windows installation to an IBM blade within an BladeCenter® S chassis, the installed Altiris Client Agent might not be able to connect to the Altiris Deployment Solution server after the deployment.
| Key | Type | Value |
|---|---|---|
| LastMCastDiscoveredTcpAddr | REG_SZ | ServerIP |
| LastMCastDiscoveredTcpPort | REG_SZ | 402 |
After you have made the changes you must restart the Altiris Client Service for them to take effect.
When you perform a Windows installation, the ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit, Windows edition attempts to install Windows to the first disk on the system presented by the diskpart command line utility. When multiple storage adapters are present on the system, the first disk presented by the diskpart utility is not always the first disk on the system.
This job will create a disk information file and store it on the source server. By default, it creates the file: C:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\temp\ID\disk_details.txt.
From the output file, locate the disk number where you would like to install Windows. Then, in the Windows installation job in Altiris, modify the TK_Partition_DiskNum variable with the correct disk number and perform the Windows Installation.
When using Scripting Toolkit to partition disks of 300 GB or larger, the process might appear to hang at 0 percent complete. The process is not hung, but it might take 15-20 minutes for the process to complete.
The ComputerName variable used for Windows installations must be alphanumeric, and must contain at least one letter. Valid values of ComputerName must be 15 characters or less.
Windows could not parse or process the unattended answer file for pass
(specialize).
The settings specified in the answer file cannot be applied.
The error was detected while processing settings for component
[Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup].<ComputerName>IBM1</ComputerName><ComputerName>*</ComputerName>You might encounter errors when using RSA-II to install Windows Server 2008 using an ISO image. These errors vary depending on the type of system to which you are installing. In order to avoid these errors, when using RSA-II to install Windows Server 2008, use a mounted physical CD or DVD instead of an ISO image.
Network installations using onboard Ethernet communications on the System x3850 and x3950 are very slow. You can avoid this problem by using an external Ethernet adapter.
Installations of Windows Server 2008 can result in an error displayed in Device Manager for a non existent PS/2 mouse.
Because the error refers to a device that is not present, it can be safely ignored.
To fix this error on a System x® 3250 server update the BIOS to level 1.42a or higher.
You cannot use the Toolkit for Altiris to deploy Windows Server 2012 on systems with an active software RAID controller. As an alternative, you can use ServerGuide to deploy Windows Server 2012 on these systems.
Passwords cannot be set in "replicate" mode. They can only be set in
"batch" or "set" mode.cmosSuperPassword=<hidden>
cmosUserPassword=<hidden>On the xSeries 226 with BIOS Level PME170CUS, savestat.cmd cannot save a value to byte nine in persistent storage.
When performing deployments to a BladeCenter HS22, type 1936 or 7870, the system might be unable to access the bootable media being used for the deployment. This error is caused by the system's inability to find the mounted media tray.
When this problem occurs, it is possible for all blades in the chassis to lose access to the media tray. To correct the problem, restart the BladeCenter Advanced Management Module (AMM) to restore access to the media tray.
To correct the problem, update the firmware for the system and the BladeCenter chassis to the latest level available.
If it isn't feasible to update the firmware, or if the problem persists, you can avoid it by using the Remote Control feature from the AMM to perform your deployment. For more information on this deployment method, please refer to Installing Windows remotely.
A yellow exclamation point icon might be displayed by Device Manager for the Microsoft ISATAP adapter after installing Windows Server 2008. In most cases, the adapter is functioning properly and you can continue to use the device normally.
For more information on this situation, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932520.
Booting from SAN using the Brocade Fibre Channel Adapters listed in this document is not supported.
The Target WWNN, Target WWPN and LUN number on the Fibre HBA Toolkit variables need to be set to configure the Primary, Alternate 1, Alternate 2 and Alternate 3 boot device settings. The default settings will NOT work on Emulex Fibre HBA adapters.
The IBM Scripting Toolkit support only 32-bit RAID configuration of ServeRAID SCSI and LSI SCSI RAID controllers. If 64-bit RAID configuration is attempted, you might receive a "No controller found" message. To avoid this issue, use the x86 RAID configuration for the SCSI controllers.
When installing the platform agent on Windows Server 2008, it might fail with return code 400. This indicates that the target system does not include Windows Installer 4.5.
To resolve this issue, follow the instructions in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 942288: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942288.
When you install Windows 2008 using ServerGuide, ownership of the disk is assigned to TrustedInstaller. This is different from the default assignment of Administrators in a native Windows installation. To use the default assignment, edit the security property of the installation file to assign ownership to Administrators.
When performing IBM Director Agent For Window install, you might encounter an error message "The system cannot find the drive specified", which might be caused by incorrect drives inventory setting.