Deployment Workbench – Update vs. Update (Files Only)

As you may notice when using Deployment Workbench on MDT 2008, after you’ve made some changes to your installation you need to update your deployment points, because the changes you’ve made on your “local machine” need to be replicated/published to your deployment points.

When updating (right-clicking on the deployment point), you have 2 options to choose:
update and update (files only).

if you’ve made any changes involving Windows PE (like change your CustomSettings.ini or adding network drivers) you’ll need to use Update option.

For all the rest you should use Update (files only) option.

P.S.: If for any reason the Update (files only) didn’t work and Update did…please let me know about that.

 

Task Sequences – Installing MSI files

Because of other working commitments, I’ve been a little aways from Windows Vista Deployment.
Now that I’ve some time for this I’ve started exploring the applications installations.

MDT really facilitates the job of installing application silently.
Like pretty much everything on MDT it’s all ‘wizard driven’ and a lot of work it’s saved on that part.

Today I’ve tried to install some MSI files and will testing it I got an error with something like this:
“Return code from command = 193″

After some research I’ve noticed that the trick is to always use msiexec /i command for installing any MSI file. Without this specific command (that it’s normaly not needed when installing from a command-line), the error always occurs.

Example:
msiexec /i C:\Application.msi /qr /norestart

Hope this helps you save some time!