Desperately fighting system image utility

Hello

Well, I am trying to come up with a good way of deploying a mac image. Originally I built a net restore image, with all the apps needed, however this was very big and took a long time to do, still needed a lot of configuring at the end, and broke the CS6 install so I had reinstall CS6 anyway.

Now i tried creating a netrestore image of just the base OS with updates, for some reason, even though I created the net restore image in exactly the same way this netrestore image would not boot my macs.

My next idea is to create a netinstall image. I want to be able to have the net install automatically install OS X, create a user account, and then bind the computer to my active directory domain.

So far none of this has worked. I have discovered from research that the create user account action only works for netboot images, reason for this no one knows, because apple decided presumably.

However my research shows that the apply system configuration settings option should work with netinstall. However it's not working for me.

Here's how my workflow looks so far

Define Image Source: Mac OS X Install ESD

Partition Disk: 1 partition called MacHD

Enable Automaded Installation: On volume named MacHD

Apply System Configuration Settings: Connect to my domain, ethernet address - any computer, myusername, mypassword. Generate unique computer names starting with M

Create Image - Netinstall

Ok, so is there anything I am doing wrong?

I have discovered I can get away with minimal config and user input using apple remote desktop, I just need it to auto join the domain and auto create the admin account.

Help please