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.

So, I’ve been creating custom images this week and capturing them to my MDT machine.  I got around to the x86 image, customized it, updated it, captured it, imported it, then tested and failed.  I couldn’t figure out why – hence the hair pulling.  And then I found it.  Like a glowing pot of gold hidden under a rock in the deepest part of the forest, I found the problem:

The DVD I got the source files from in the top image was build number 6.1.7600.16385.  Some update that I was running on the image I was customizing was updating this build to 6.1.7600.16481.  So, when I would go back to try to test the customized image, I’d get an error at the start of the task sequence that goes something like this:

Operating System deployment did not complete successfully.

Error: Unable to find SETUP , needed to install the image
\\MDT_Server\DeploymentShare$\Operating Systems\W7x86_CAP_3-4-10\W7x86_CAP_3-4-10.WIM

I tried the Google route, and found a bunch of unrelated stuff.  Turns out, if the build number is the same on a custom image as on an image with the full source files, MDT will not require setup sources for the custom image.  It will take it from the existing sources in another OS.  So, when it was looking for the setup sources for my 16481 build, it couldn’t find it.

There you have it.  Be careful running updates on custom images.  Make sure you have the sources with the same build number or it won’t work.

So, every time you make a change in MDT, you have to update the deployment point, which in most cases will regenerate the boot wims.  When you have four deployment points, this can be a pain just to update a task sequence.  After a bit of Googling, I found this:

You’ve probably gone through this cycle if you are using WDS to PXE boot computers to start bare metal Lite Touch deployments:

• Import new drivers or change bootstrap.ini.
• “Update deployment share” to generate new WIMs.
• Import new WIMs into WDS.

Fortunately, with the new “update” process in MDT 2010 … it’s pretty simple to add a script to automate this process.

So, there’s a script you can create to do this job for you.  For posterity, the procedure is copied below.

First, create a script file – we’ll call it “UpdateExit.vbs” – and save it – we’ll save it in C:\Scripts\ for the purpose of this demonstration.  Paste the following into UpdateExit.vbs:

Option Explicit

Dim oShell, oEnv

Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set oEnv = oShell.Environment("PROCESS")

If oEnv("STAGE") = "ISO" then

    Dim sCmd, rc

    sCmd = "WDSUTIL /Replace-Image /Image:""Lite Touch Windows PE (" & oEnv("PLATFORM") & ")"" /ImageType:Boot /Architecture:" & oEnv("PLATFORM") & " /ReplacementImage /ImageFile:""" & oEnv("CONTENT") & "\Sources\Boot.wim"""
    WScript.Echo "About to run command: " & sCmd

    rc = oShell.Run(sCmd, 0, true)
    WScript.Echo "WDSUTIL rc = " & CStr(rc)

    WScript.Quit 1

End if

Now, edit “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\Templates\LiteTouchPE.xml” and change the following (starting around line 90):

<!– Exits –>
<Exits>
  <Exit>cscript.exe "%INSTALLDIR%\Samples\UpdateExit.vbs"</Exit>
</Exits>

to look like this:

<!– Exits –>
<Exits>
  <Exit>cscript.exe "%INSTALLDIR%\Samples\UpdateExit.vbs"</Exit>
  <Exit>cscript.exe "C:\Scripts\UpdateExit.vbs"</Exit>
</Exits>

Instructions are include in the link above if MDT is installed on a different server than WDS.

Credit: Automatically Update MDT 2010 boot images in WDS