OSD and RunOnce

June 25th, 2011 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

I recently stumbled onto a somewhat major issue during OSD that is the result of a fundamental (bad) assumption made by many including Windows itself and Internet Explorer. That assumption is that at some point during the deployment of Windows (Windows 7 in this case), an Administrator will log on to the system. This may …
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Installing Fonts During OSD

June 23rd, 2011 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

Here’s a simple little script to install fonts during OSD. Note that this is an example of not doing any manual work during OSD: manual work is un-IT. A quick web search, using Bing of course (Hey, Scripting Guy! How Can I Install Fonts Using a Script- – Hey), and a little scripting knowledge resulted …
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Accessing OSD Troubleshooting Tools

April 16th, 2011 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

About the only method for troubleshooting issues in OSD is to drop to a command-prompt (by pressing F8) and then running whatever tool you need; e.g., Trace32. The only real problem with this method is making whatever tools you need available to you. This is typically done by adding the tools directly to the boot …
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Offline Updates in ConfigMgr Task Sequences with MDT

April 10th, 2011 | Posted by Jason in ConfigMgr 2007 | Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

As many folks know, there is a known issue with Software Updates in Windows 7 Task Sequences: http://blogs.technet.com/b/configmgrteam/archive/2011/01/28/known-issue-install-software-updates-action-hangs-on-windows-7.aspx. There is no official word of a fix for this issue which by most accounts happens for a number of seemingly different reasons once the number of updates to be applied gets “large” — although bafflingly enough, …
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Microsoft.SMS.TSEnvironment

February 23rd, 2010 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

So COM is a huge topic that I can’t even imagine scratching the surface of in a single post; MSDN and CodeProject are two great places to learn about COM though. Note also that in many ways, COM has been replaced by .Net so you won’t even see many people using it anymore, but it …
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OSD “OS Install Packages” vs. “OS Images”

August 19th, 2009 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

What’s the difference? Why two types? When should I use each? These are frequent queries I get from customers and are also often echoed in the forums. OS Install Packages are packages built using the actual source files from the OS media. For Windows XP/2003, this includes all of the individual files (in a compressed …
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OSD and SAN Disks

July 16th, 2009 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

Working with a customer recently, they had an issue using SAN attached disks during Operating System Deployment. They could successfully create and format the SAN attached disk as the D drive during the WinPE portion of the task sequence, but the disk would go offline during the Windows 2008 mini-setup. This was causing a major …
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Task Sequence Restart

May 30th, 2009 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

I just stumbled on this today; i.e., I can’t take credit for all of it (http://develnet.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html). It is a great way to restart a task sequence from within Windows PE preventing the lengthy hardware reboots particularly on servers. Simply kill TsmBootstrap.exe and start a new instance of TsBootShell.exe. You can kill TsmBootstrap.exe by starting the …
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Operating System Deployment and 2003 R2

May 21st, 2009 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

Just thought I’d document the steps taken at a recent customer engagement for deploying Windows Server 2003 with the R2 bits in the image. 1. Copy the entire R2 CD to your package source repository. 2. Create a standard software distribution package for the R2 source directory. 3. Create a program with the following command-line: …
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Build and Capture and Software Updates

March 16th, 2009 | Posted by Jason in Configuration Manager | Operating System Deployment - (0 Comments)

A problem that crops up on the forums every now and then in addition to causing me to pull out some hair is deploying updates during a Build and Capture Task Sequence (TS). There are actually two problems that manifest themselves during a Build and Capture that don’t normally occur and both are caused because …
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