OK, so I haven’t had a chance to finish up either of the two posts I’ve been working on, so to start I’m merging them into one larger MDT post. Secondly, however, I’ve also been working with a friend of mine on creating a logon script for his environment that will replace a certain other tool they are using for logon management for their mix of 9x and 2000 workstations. They’re slowly upgrading their back-end environment in preparation for a migration to Windows 7 on the clients, and they wanted to see if they could move from <product> to logon scripts and group policy (they are going to be using MDT and SCCM for deployment and lifecycle management). They had to try and completely replace their current solution with group policy and a logon script (or scripts), and this has been accomplished.
Having a USB key that will install multiple versions of Windows is great, but what if you want to add other Windows PE images to it, above and beyond the installers? For example, what if you wanted to add a recovery environment, like the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT), or a BartPE environment, or any other Windows PE-based environments? Well, it’s not that hard to do, and I’ll document how to do it with the Microsoft DaRT x86 and x64 recovery ISOs that it creates in this example.
Adding the DaRT files
First, you will need to copy the files from the MS DaRT WinPE ISO image to your “Content” folder that was created when you used MDT 2010 as per my previous post. The content folder should look something like this:
And the contents of the MS DaRT ISO image, once extracted to the hard disk, will look something like this:
This is a preview of
Adding additional boot options to your deployment USB key
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Read the full post (1048 words, 19 images, estimated 4:12 mins reading time)
To go along with my previous post on deploying Windows via MDT 2010, here is a list of the “default” keys that Windows uses when you choose not to enter a product key during setup. These keys of course will not activate, but you can enter them into your task sequences when you are prompted for a product key to use. This will make your setup more unattended.
Here’s the list:
Windows Vista:
- Ultimate - VMCB9-FDRV6-6CDQM-RV23K-RP8F7
- Business - 4D2XH-PRBMM-8Q22B-K8BM3-MRW4W
- Home Premium - X9HTF-MKJQQ-XK376-TJ7T4-76PKF
- Home Basic - RCG7P-TX42D-HM8FM-TCFCW-3V4VD
- Starter - X9PYV-YBQRV-9BXWV-TQDMK-QDWK4
Windows 7:
- Ultimate - D4F6K-QK3RD-TMVMJ-BBMRX-3MBMV
- Professional - HYF8J-CVRMY-CM74G-RPHKF-PW487
- Home Premium - RHPQ2-RMFJH-74XYM-BH4JX-XM76F
- Home Basic - YGFVB-QTFXQ-3H233-PTWTJ-YRYRV
- Starter - 7Q28W-FT9PC-CMMYT-WHMY2-89M6G
This is a preview of
Default Keys for Vista and Windows 7 deployment
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Read the full post (189 words, estimated 45 secs reading time)
Ever wanted to put every version of Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, and perhaps a version of XP or two on a single USB key? No? Then you’re probably normal. If you’re like me, however, the thought has crossed your mind. However, the daunting task of configuring said USB key to boot to some multiboot Linux distro or hacking a bit at bcdedit to boot a WinPE to handle it also made it something to avoid, at least for me, because, well, I tend to be lazy about these things.
However, after playing with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit for a bit, I realized I could probably make my USB key bend to my will and be said multi-bootable Windows OS installer, without a whole lot of work. I set about to put all of those versions of Windows one one key, along with some unattended applications (for this blog post, I’m just adding Office 2007 to keep it short).
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