My latest home project involves using a Intel NUC (D54250WY) as a HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer), or in short I will use at as a media client for either Plex or XBMC (haven't quite made up my mind yet). I put 16 GB of RAM in the device, and a 240 GB mSATA hard […]
If you are following the twitter feeds from the various OSD gurus out there you might stumbled across Mikael Nystrom’s great post about creating a webpage containing the MDT monitoring data. This a perfectly good example of how you can extend the MDT Monitoring, but that of course requires that you actually have it enabled […]
In a previous post I covered how to deploy the UEFI based Surface 2 machine using ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3. The steps are quite similar for ConfigMgr 2012 R2 integrated with MDT 2013. In this post you learn how to configure the ConfigMgr 2012 R2 task sequence for UEFI deployments. The default MDT task sequence […]
For those of you being involved in a few Windows 8.1 deployment projects already (I have), you have probably stumbled into that setup behaves a bit differently in Windows 8.1 than it used to do in Windows 8. So far no fix has been announced, but I'm hoping there will be one-. The issue Shorthand, […]
Earlier this week I saw a tweet from Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) where he posting his top ten posts from his blog, and I thought: Hey, I'm stealing that idea! 🙂 And while I'm at it, why not add some stats to it as well. Thank you all visitors! 2013 turned out to be the best […]
In Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft finally added in PowerShell support for Windows Deployment Services. The official TechNet documentation that you find here, is not entirely correct though: The module is not named WindowsDeploymentServices as the TechNet documentation states, but instead WDS. Note: The cmdlets only works if you execute them locally on the WDS […]
Armed with a HP ML350P, a huge pile of hard drives, SQLIO, PowerShell, CreateFile, and Captain Morgan (with diet coke) I set out to test what type of performance the HP Smart Array 420i controller would give me. Here is the result. Background info Benchmarking is never an exact science, but with the same type […]
Whoever wrote the new volume wizard in Windows Server 2012 R2 had a odd sense of humor (or was just not very good at writing code). I mean, 1.54 TB is of course not equal to 1.54 TB, right? Anyway, this week is book-writing week, and when me and my very good friend and partner […]
If you ever tried to use GPO Packs in MDT 2013 or ConfigMgr 2012 R2, you quickly find out they will fail for Windows 8.1. The reason? Microsoft forgot to add support for Windows 8.1 in the ZTIApplyGPOPack.wsf script. Luckily it's easy to fix, and while you're at it, why not also add support for […]
To fully support deploying Windows 8.1 using ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3 you need to have a WinPE 5.0 boot image. Here is a PowerShell script that builds one for you. The script adds the needed components as well as inject drivers, add custom files, and optionally, add in the DaRT 8.1 components from MDOP 2013 […]
Note: For ConfigMgr Current Branch you want to read this article instead: Adding DaRT to ConfigMgr Boot Images – And starting it earlier than earlyhttps://deploymentresearch.com/adding-dart-to-configmgr-boot-images-and-starting-it-earlier-than-early/ When integrating MDT 2013 with ConfigMgr 2012 R2 (which you should, Capish!), and if you have access to DaRT 8.1 (MDOP 2013 R2), you can remote into WinPE when deploying […]
This week I was assigned the task of deploying a Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64 image to a few Surface 2 Pro machines, using ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3 integrated with MDT 2012 Update 1. I had already created the necessary WinPE 5.0 boot images as outlined on Niall Brady's blog, and applied the UEFI fix from […]
This week I was doing a ConfigMgr 2012 R2 class in New York, and one of students asked if he could get the script I used to create the VM I use to build my reference images. Sure, here it is: Happy Deployment,/ Johan
Back in 2005 I wrote my first ADSI for plugin WinPE (WinPE 2005 or v1.6), and per request I have since then updated it for every WinPE release… This is the release for WinPE 5.0 (part of ADK 8.1). Note: I don't recommend using ADSI in WinPE. It's not supported by Microsoft, and this release […]
For anyone doing OSD with MDT 2012/2013 and ConfigMgr 2012, the current OS support-matrix is just utterly confusing. Here are the facts: ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3 – Supports deploying the following Operating Systems as OS Images Windows XP SP3 x86 Windows XP SP2 x64 Windows Vista SP2 Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 8.1 (assuming a […]
Here is a quick tip for finding WinPE drivers for Dell Servers. You also find an additional tip in the end of the post that can help you find drivers for Windows Server 2012 R2. Update 2013-12-16: In addition to the steps last steps, and thanks Mirko Schnellbach (@MadMirko) for tweeting this, you can also […]
On November 13, 2013, I presented a webinar for System Center Universe were I was using a few PowerShell scripts (well two), to enumerate variables during deployment. After the session I got a request for the scripts, so here they are: EnumVariable.ps1 Just listing the variables used by the task sequence EnumVariablesAndValues.ps1 Listing the variables […]
This article is basically the same as my Adding Internet Explorer 10 to your Windows 7 SP1 reference image post that was published in July 2013, but obviously this one is updated for Internet Explorer 11. For those of you using Windows 8 only, don’t bother reading, just replace your Windows 8 images with Windows […]
Earlier this week I got an email from a fellow deployment geek, where he wanted to know how he could enable the local Administrator account on his Windows To Go stick (Windows 8.1 Enterprise). He had created the reference image in MDT 2013 (as you always should), but after running through the Windows To Go […]
Some times you want to execute a script after the MDT Task Sequence is completed, for example to cleanup any setup leftovers or to configure a user for autologon (something that MDT by default prevents). This script will clean out any leftover C:\MININT or C:\_SMSTaskSequence folders, enable (optional) autologon with another user account, and then […]