Personal note no 6: Create Local User and add to Local group
Personal note no 6: Easy way to add create a local account and add it to administrators as a part of a Task Sequence
Finding and adding only the correct device driver to the Boot image
How to figure out the exact drivers necessary for the WinPE 3.0 boot image for SCCM to work properly, and keeping the amount of drivers to a bare minimum.
Personal note no.5 : Make driver available for none admin user!
Staging driver in the driverstore, makeing it available for none admin user!
Power management trough the TS (No more automatic Sleep!)
I have a number of customers who wants to set the power settings trough the TS, as opposed to using GPO’s. I guess that makes sense if you want to allow you users to change the settings them self… By default windows 7 will set the following power options: Sleep/standby in 15 min on battery (DC), Sleep/standby in 30 min on Power (AC). Hibernation after 360 min on both AC and DC. Sleep/standby when lid is closed on laptop. Some of my customers do not want their machines to sleep or hibernate, unless the user makes this choice. this [...]
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012
The first beta is now available on Microsoft Connect… Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Beta 1 adds support for System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Further info here https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=8689
Set default keyboard settings based on Running OS
While doing refresh scenarios, its possible to have USMT set the current Keyboard settings for the existing users on the reinstalled OS. The problem however, is setting the same default keyboard settings for new users on that machine.. By default the Keyboard settings will be that of the reference image, so if the keyboard settings in the image is en-US/00000409 it will be so on the deployed machine, unless this is changed somehow ( E.g Unattend.xml, variable, Reg e.t.c) In an XP to Win7 migration scenario (or 7 to 7), you could run a script, to pick up the current [...]
Can’t find the Intel(R) 6 Series storage driver!
Finding the Intel 6 series driver for an XP OS deployment
VBScript: Cleanup all computer objects for local PC
[download id="40"] When we are deploying OS via ConfigMgr, we usually do a cleanup of all old objects before creating the new object. This helps prevent errors and mistakes, and is pretty easy to do. We are able to use both SMBOIS GUID and Mac addresses for the cleanup. usually I recommend using mac addresses, since I have experienced that laptops who have had their mainboard exchanged, have the BIOS GUID of "0000-00000-0000-0000", this happens because the repair shop forgets to write in the GUID after the repair. The mac addresses are always usable , since they are not typed [...]
Personal note no 4: Pause a task sequence
Pause a task sequence for a specified number of seconds before continuing with the next step!
SCCM Admins guide to preparing your environment for Bitlocker Drive Encryption – part 1
If you use Configuration Manager 2007 it is pretty simple to enable Bitlocker as part of your OS deployment. But you still need prepare your environment for Bitlocker and this is done external of Configuration Manager 2007. This guide is meant for SCCM admins wanting to enable Bitlocker and will guide you through the process step-by-step. This post is the first in a 3 part series describing how you prepare your environment for Bitlocker Drive Encryption. We will look at the requirement for Bitlocker and how you extend your Active Directory Schema if you run Windows Server 2003 SP1/SP2 Windows [...]
USMT 4.0, Hardlink and Bitlocker in SCCM OSD
USMT 4.0, Hardlink and Bitlocker in SCCM OSD
Set up a SCCM test environment in no time!
If you need a full blown Test environment, here is how to set that up in no time at all
There may be to many steps in the task sequence!
There may be too many steps in the task sequence Error caused by faulty MDT integration
Personal Notes nr. 3 – Can’t find computer name for local admin logon
Loging in as Administrator without knowing the name of the computer.
Coretech SCCM Manager 1.0.4 – Freeware Download
[download id="32"] This week a customer contacted us, claiming that the tool did not work on sundays! I thought that was pretty strange, so I asked for log file/event log messages, and it was true. It did fail! It was even “Kernelbase.dll” or “kernel32.dll” that was throwing the exception! I tested it on our test environment, and got the same errors.! I turned out to be an old Visual Basic function, that is used to retrieve the name of the current day, that was failing on sundays. This new version has an updated logfile writer, which writes the correct format [...]
Auto adding files to Config.Mgr Boot Images
Using the OSDinjection.xml to customize the Config.Mgr Bootmedia upon updating DP!
Personal Notes nr.2 – Removing a locked hardlink store
Using usmtutils.exe to make sure the hardlink store is removed after succesfull restore.
Personal notes nr.1 – USMT 4.0 with multiple partitions
So to remember all the small stuff/solutions I encounter during my work day, I decided to create a series of short post, as kind of reminder to myself on small tips and tricks , as swell as solutions to basic problems. I figure that instead of writing this stuff down in a word doc, I might as well share it ( so don’t be surprised if some of the things seams almost to simple ) Today I ran into problems doing hardlink USMT 4.0 on some machines having tree partitions, (one of them being the BDE 300 MB Partition). [...]
Getting a Hardcopy of the TS progress report.
I guess everyone uses the report showing how fare along a Task Sequence actually is, or if one of the steps has failed. But sometimes this report disappears after the TS finishes, so wouldn’t it be nice to always have it available afterword to see it one or more steps have failed, or to evaluate if an option acts like expected.. Well with a little help from one of my collages (Claus Codam) I created this routine to have that available, in by LOGS folder, and here is how. 1. Create a new user to use for reporting (in [...]
Making file copy easy.
I often run into questions concerning simple file copy during a SCCM/MDT Task Sequence. There are many ways to accomplish this, but it seams most people wind up using the good old XCOPY command, and in general there is nothing wrong with that. When copying from a DP though, you might run into problems when copying all files and folders in the root on your source, as that points to the root of X:\windows and not the root of the package specified.. Well to work around any issues I created a small VBS script, that takes care of the copying [...]
Create ISO using WAIK and OSCDIMG
To make an ISO file with a bundle of files, all you need is the Windows Automation Installation Kit WAIK. No need to pay for any 3rd party tool to do this. This Kit includes a tool OSCDIMG primarily used for making a bootable ISO of your WinPE, but can however also be use it to create a simple ISO file containing files, so you can access them trough CD mounting, in your Virtual environments. (or what ever you would need the files for) For this to work you must of cause have the Windows AIK installed on the [...]
Capture none syspreped image using SCCM (Running imagex from a TS)
One of the limitations of SCCM is the use of Imagex. When you want to capture an image of a computer, this computer needs to be syspreped before capture, or the capture process will fail. To do a capture of a reference image before sysprep, you normally would have to create a separate WinPE and run ImageX from that. This is also the case if you want to backup a system. So once again MDT comes to the rescue… By using the ZTIBackup.wsf script, you not only get to run ImageX from a Task Sequence, you also utilize the [...]
Creating a JoinDomain account for use with SCCM OSD
Because The join domain account is often visible in your deployment answer file (unattend.xml of sysprep.inf) during the WinPE phase, it is important that this specific account does not have any more permission, than the bare minimum.. I often experience that a domain admin account is used for this job, which is a huge security breach. When i ask why this is, the answer is normally “ we can not find the information on how to create an account with only join domain rights”. So her is a step by step guide on how to create such an account! [...]
Using TS variables when running a script under a different account.
One of the features available when running a Task Sequence in Config Mgr R2, is to run a command line as a different user, which can comes in handy in a number of scenarios. There is however a small but important thing to be aware of. When using this step to run a script, you will notice that you cannot use any of the “task sequence variables”, as they are not passed through to script. So if you need to use any of the TS variables in your scripts you will have to pass them to the script as arguments [...]