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13Nov/090

Small workaround when Clear PXE advertisements doesn’t seem to work

I find it very annoying that sometimes when I clear an PXE Advertisement from the SCCM console and I reboot the machine I still get the PXE Boot Aborted message… a small workaround I always use is the following.

  • Clear the PXE Advertisement using SCCM console
  • Stop the WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server
  • Clear RemoteInstall$\SMSTemp on the SCCM PXE Server
  • Start WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server

And voila! The advertisement does work this time around…

All in all I have experienced a lot of troubles with PXE and SCCM… I am really hoping the next version of SCCM will bring major improvements to this part….

2Nov/094

Creating a custom boot image for SCCM SP2 (WinPE 3.0)

Today I had to recreate my x86 boot image in my SCCM environment. I had just upgraded my testserver to SCCM SP2 and found that the old way of creating a boot image didn’t work anymore… seeing as SCCM SP2 uses DISM.exe instead of imagex and peimg. So I went looking for instructions on creating a custom SCCM SP2 image, but couldn’t found any, so here are the instructions :) .

1. Start the Deployment Tools Command prompt and enter the following command:

COPYPE.CMD x86 1 c:\WINPE

When you're working on a 64-bit WinPE image use "amd64" instead of "x86"

2. Mount the winpe.wim file to the mount dir that’s created automatically:

DISM /Mount-Wim /WIMFile:c:\winpe\winpe.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\winpe\mount

3. Add the packages required by SCCM to the wim (again, if you’re working on 64-bit Windows PE substitute "x86" with "amd64")

DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-scripting.cab”

DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-wmi.cab”

After this step you can continue adding packages (such as winpe-hta.cab and winpe-mdac.cab) or custom files to the boot image. The 2 packages worked out above (Scripting and WMI) are required by SCCM, without these packages you will receive an error during updating your boot image to the distribution points.

4. Commit the changes to the WIM and unmount the WIM

DISM /Unmount-Wim /Mountdir:c:\winpe\mount /commit             (thank you for the correction Matt!, It appears as if I was quite sleepy when I wrote this post ;) )

5. Import your custom boot image into SCCM.

That’s it, just as simple as it was with the previous version of WAIK, only different commands :)

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29Oct/090

The fundamental flaw of “thin-clients”

Check out this great article by Jeroen van de Kamp:

 http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/jeroenvandekamp/archive/2009/10/28/the-fundamental-flaws-of-thin-clients.aspx

In his article Jeroen points out why organizations should steer away from “thin-clients” and steer towards ‘thin-PC’s”.

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13Oct/090

New version of the MDT Wizard Editor is available

As I was browsing a few of my standard blog sites this morning I noticed that Michael Niehaus has uploaded a new version of the MDT Wizard Editor.

Original post by Michael here

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8Oct/090

Disk to VHD Converter (Disk2VHD)

The Sysinternals guys did it again :) . This time they have given us the "Poor mans P2V" solution, and they call it: Disk2VHD.

image

The idea behind this is pretty cool, they use the Windows Volume Snapshot capability, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to convert. It will create one VHD for every disk but it will only include the partitions you select. The really cool thing about this: You can run it ONLINE!

image

There are some (small) limitations the VHD size limit is 127GB (because virtual pc doesn't support bigger VHD’s), and do not attach the VHD’s on the same system you created them because you will get an collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk.

Ofcourse they put in in their Sysinternals Suite that can be downloaded from here

7Oct/090

Add optional updates to MDT

Since Henk is the MDT guy on this blog he got me interested enough to give it a try. For testing purposes i use and break a lot of virtual machines so using MDT + WDS to recreate them wasn’t such a bad idea. Out of the box you can give your task sequence the option to run windows update post-setup: But then it will run every time :( .  As you all know you can add your own applications as optional packages so you can select them pre-installation. This got me thinking: Let’s add windows update as optional package and use the framework that’s already available for this.

Howto:

  • Add a new application
  • Standard application
    • Quiet installation command
      • cscript.exe "%SCRIPTROOT%\ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf"

That’s it :)

 MDT UPDATE

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5Oct/092

Whoo!! VMware reads our blog.

Or maybe not ;) , it could be they already planned to release a new beta version of ThinApp in november. VMware announced this news at VMworld 2009. The final release is planned for Q1 2010 a little late if you ask me.. since there are already some working versions out there: for instance check Rubens video

Next to that i also found a nice howto that shows how to decompile Thinapp and Xenocode packages created by NickOn and a nice little script that executes Thinreg in a decent way with support for recursive folders (here).

30Sep/090

MDT 2010: Fix for ‘Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed”

There is now a fix for the problem that MDT 2010 has when connecting to the deployment share with different credentials in sysprep, refresh, replace and custom task-sequences.

Read more about it here

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