Rodney Buike - Founder and original lazy admin.
Daniel Nerenberg - Microsoft MVP and lazy admin.
Disclaimer
These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. You assume all risk for your use.
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The otherday I wrote about how you can do a system requirements validation in MDT 2010 Update 1 to ensure the hardware meets the requirements of the OS being deployed. One thing I discovered in lab testing is that Virtual PC7 reports the CPU back to MDT as a 1MHz CPU. Naturally this will cause issues when you try and do a test deployment to a Virtual PC7 VM.
The workaround is simple, just remove the processor speed check in the New Computer – Validate section of the Task Sequence.
Hope that helps!
Microsoft has a set of minimum and recommended hardware requirements for Windows 7. There are some great, free, tools available to asses your current environment and there is functionality built into MDT 2010 Update 1 to verify that the hardware you are deploying too meets these requirements. Most importantly Update 1 added a processor speed check to ensure you are not deploying to machines with CPUs that are too slow. There are two places in the task sequence that will validate the system requirements.
You can edit these to match the requirements you have put in place based on your organizations needs.
MDT 2010 is a great tool you can use to deploy Windows 7 in your environment. I allows you to use what is known as LTI or Lite Touch Installation to install Windows. It is called LTI because someone needs to touch the machine in the form of booting it up selecting a task sequence and answering a few questions in the LiteTouch Wizard. You can reduce the amount of prompts and make it “lighter” with some tweaking of MDT.
When you kick off the MDT LiteTouch Wizard the first thing it asks you for is the credentials of an account that has permissions to access the deployment share. This can be a domain account or a local account on the MDT server. You can provide this to the deployment technicians or include it in the bootstrap.ini. To include it in the bootstrap.ini right-click on the deployment share and select Properties.
Continue reading Customizing MDT 2010 Wizards
Desktop wallpapers. I swear this is the number one complaint when a user gets their new Windows 7 desktop. Losing a users desktop wallpaper is guaranteed to lead to a call to the help desk as soon as they login. USMT does transfer the wallpaper settings however there are cases when even if the image is transferred it doesn’t get applied, or worse it doesn’t get transferred. In an offline migration, one done within WindowsPE say as part of a MDT/SCCM Task Sequence, the wallpaper settings won’t be transferred by default. You can ensure these files and settings are captured by adding the following to a custom XML file for USMT. Simply copy and past this into your custom XML file and you’ll have less calls to the help desk and happier users.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<migration urlid="http://www.microsoft.com/migration/1.0/migxmlext/wallpaper">
<!– This component migrates wallpaper settings
Continue reading Migrating Wallpapers with USMT
Errors with the MSI Installer, aka MSIExec.exe, show up now and then and can be frustrating to fix. You’ll see these errors trying to install applications, updates, hotfixes and any other type of MSI packages. There are a few things to do to fix this issue depending on how messed up it is. In the simplest of cases simply re-registering the MSI Installer.
Reboot the computer into Safe Mode
From a command line run MSIExec /regserver
Reboot the computer normally
If that does not solve the problem you have to reinstall the MSI Installer. It is another simple process just follow these steps:
Open a command prompt and change directory to %windir%\system32
Run attrib -r -s -h dllcache
Rename the following files to .old
msi.dll
msiexec.exe
msihnd.dll
Reboot
Download Windows Installer (latest version 4.5) and install
Reboot
If you are doing this on Windows Vista/Server 2008/R2 or Windows 7 you will need
Continue reading Repair The MSI Installer
During a migration from Windows XP/Vista to Windows 7 you will probably use the User State Migration Toolkit to migrate user profile data from one OS to another. USMT is a powerful tool that eases the migration of user data and can be further customized to include data outside of the user profile. This data can include:
- Specific files not stored in default user profile areas
- Specific folders not stored in default user profile areas
- Specific file types and move them into a specific folder
- Registry keys
- Custom applications
We’ll start with a simple example, capturing a folder:
<migration urlid="http://www.microsoft.com/migration/1.0/migxmlext/test">
<component type="Documents" context="System">
<displayName>Component to migrate all Engineering Drafts Documents without subfolders</displayName>
<role role="Data">
<rules>
Continue reading Including Additional Data in USMT Migrations
Yesterday I posted a how to on building a custom WinPE disk with ImageX. There is another tool you can use that was released with Windows 7 called DISM that you can use as well. Let’s take a look at that tool as well as some additional options you can use. There are a few components you need before you get started:
Once you have installed the Windows AIK launch Windows PE Tools Command Prompt, located under Start –> Program Files –> Windows AIK, with Administrative credentials. From there we need to run a few commands to copy and mount the WIM image before we can edit it.
The first command copies the WIM image to the working directory:
copype.cmd x86 c:\Winpe_x86
This will copy the x86 WIM file and create the necessary working directories. To create a 64bit WinPE environment just substitute “x86” with
Continue reading Create a Custom WinPE Disk with DISM
Prior to Windows 7 there weren’t a lot (err any) legal options to create your own Windows PE image. There was BartPE or Winternals ERD Commander but nothing you could do on your own. This changed when Windows 7 hit the street and you can now make your own WinPE image. With Windows PE you can boot a system into a pre-executable environment and make changes to the installed system. It is a very useful troubleshooting tool that can be made more useful by adding additional tools to the disk. There are a few components you need before you get started:
Once you have installed the Windows AIK launch Windows PE Tools Command Prompt, located under Start –> Program Files –> Windows AIK, with Administrative credentials. From there we need to run a few commands to copy and mount the WIM image
Continue reading Creating A Custom WinPE Disk
Before capturing your Windows 7 image you need to Sysprep it. The Sysprep tool hasn’t changed but a reminder of the options is always nice. In Windows 7 the Sysprep files are located at:
%WINDIR%\System32\sysprep
You can double click the executable or use the command line to seal the system. The options available are:
When you view the properties of your Windows 7 installation from an OEM install you might see some support information provided by the vendor. You can customize this for your own organization within the Windows image you deploy with some registry modifications.
Open a registry editor and drill down to:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation
There are a number of sub keys you can add here to include your own support information.
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