As we continue to forge ahead in our brazen quest to upgrade our enterprise to Windows 7, we’ve found ourselves reaching the limits of what we can reasonably expect from WDS and MDT. For us, jobsites pose an interesting issue with deployment.
Our jobsites are mostly on DSL with some sort of VPN or MPLS connection back to the office. Some of our jobsites don’t even have internet. So, the question becomes how do we deploy Windows 7 to these remote and/or unconnected jobsites. I don’t think it’s fair to expect seven to nine gigabytes of image and task sequence data to traverse the 3 Mbps (and sometimes 1.5!) link these places have with corporate (or a branch office that has a deployment server). So, what about taking bootable media with us?
We first thought about carrying around hard drives, but decided trying to get through security at airports or otherwise just having a backpack full of drives seemed a bit problematic. Our images and all their associated data don’t come close to fitting on a DVD (or even two dual layer ones), so we decided to travel down the USB flash drive road for remote deployments.
Here’s how we did it:
I’ll assume you already have a working MDT installation with all your various OSs, applications, task sequences, and the like.
Step 1: Open your Deployment Share, and navigate down to Advanced Configuration and Media.
Step 2: Right click Media and choose New Media.
Step 3: Fill in a “Media path”. Make sure this folder exists (or that you create it via the “Browse…” option) or MDT will balk at whatever you put here. Give it some comments and pick whatever “Selection profile” is necessary for this deployment media. In my case, I needed a deployment media that contained only x64 related items (so, I created a selection profile that was limited to x64 stuff). If I tried to put all my deployment data in this media set, I wouldn’t be able to fit it on my meager 32GB flash drive.
Click Next twice. Then Click Finish.
Step 4: Navigate back to the Media section of Advanced Configuration. You’ll see your media listed here in some form of “MEDIA001” and some other information like the media root, which selection profile the media is based on, and your comments.
Step 5: Right click the media you just created and choose Update Media Content.
Step 6: Wait. MDT is copying all the data and information in your selection profile to the media root. This may take a while depending on what you’re putting into it.
Once this is done, you’re ready for your USB drive.
Step 7: Navigate to the media root you used back in step 3. Inside you’ll see A folder called “Content” and an ISO image. This ISO image is ready to burn to a CD or DVD (depending on the size of it, of course). Of course, my media folder is almost 17GB:
If you know how I can fit this a DVD, I know how you can make a lot of money.
Now, format your properly sized flash as NTFS with the allocation unit size set to default.
Copy the contents of the “Content” folder to the root of the flash drive.
Put this flash drive into the USB port on a computer, and boot the machine to the USB hard drive or USB disk option. And voilà! You’re imaging from a USB drive.
Here’s a good question – we want to do the exact same thing, and have gotten it working. However, there’s a catch – after our OS deploys, our task sequence continues to install things that require a domain connection or can’t be generalized (WSUS config, etc.) How do you prevent the USB drive from booting to WinPE again? Are you using a tool to change the BIOS boot order?
Our machines are set to boot to the hard drive. We override the boot order (in our case, by pressing F12) and select the USB drive for a one-time boot. After LiteTouch finishes dropping Windows on the hard drive, it reboots back to the hard drive.
USB not work if format in Windows XP but it work properly if I format it in Windows 7.
Anyone know why???
I would assume this is because of something Windows 7 is doing differently in the format.
To be safe, I’d stick with formatting and copying them in Windows 7.
Windows XP does not have the ability to create a bootable removable media. This was added in Windows Vista and also works in Windows 7. You can demonstrate this by opening the command prompt and typing “Diskpart” [enter] and then “list disk” [enter]. XP won’t even list the removable drives. You may be able to use an application such as Unetbootin or a disk partitioning utility to make this work in XP.