Happy 2009!

Today I just want to say everyone…

Happy New Year!

That all your wishes come true!

Best Regards!

Opening a command prompt during Windows Vista installation

This hint can be very helpfull when you get an error during Windows Vista installation.

Hit shift + F10 and you get the prompt that is specially usefull for troubleshooting purposes.

Reducing installation time after image deployment and sysprep

Those of you that experienced Windows XP deployment may notice, now with Windows Vista, that after sysprep and image deployment, the consumed time it’s a little higher than before.

These happens mainly for 2 reasons:
- First, because the new Vista Deployment is file based and not volume based (like for example Ghost) and it takes a little more time to decompress the WIM file, specialy if you’ve set the compression to high when creating the WIM.

- Second, because after the sysprep (OOBE) one of the actions on Windows Vista setup, is the collect of system assessment information using the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) mainly for rating the machine and select the best appearance for the operation system.
The assessment is made during the reference image creation, but Sysprep cleans this information.

This pass, can be “suppressed” specialy if you have an hardware controlled environment and don’t need Windows to check what to use.

Microsoft has made available an hotfix to avoid this behavior, and preserve the WINSAT information collected before the sysprep process.

More information about this hotfix can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958011

To apply this hotfix:

Tools Needed:
- KB958011 (download it through the website mentioned above)
- GimageX (optional) – this is a freeware tool and a GUI for Microsoft imageX to mount/unmount WIM files. You can download it at AutoIt Website

Steps:
- Mount your Windows Vista WIM
   (to c:\mount for example)

- Expand the KB958011 to a temp directory
  (ex.: expand Windows6.0-KB958011-x86.msu –f:* c:\temp)

- Apply KB958011 offline to the mounted Windows Vista directory
   (ex.: start /wait pkgmgr /n:c:\temp\Windows6.0-KB958011-x86.xml /o:”c:\;c:\mount\windows” /s:c:\sandbox)

- Wait a little so the hotfix is applied…

- Unmount (commit changes) the WIM file.

- Launch MS Workbench and edit your unattend.xml file

- After Windows SIM opens, reload your WIM file (on the left bellow pane)

- Again on the Windows Image pane, you’ll find a new component called Microsoft-Windows-Sysprep-SpWinSAT.

- Right-click on this new component and had it to Generalize pass.

- Change the PreserveWinSATData flag to True.

- Add a RunSynchronousCommand pass with the following command line:
winsat.exe moobe formal

- Save it all.

- Done.

In my particular case, this changes made me get less 11 minuts of Windows installation.

Hope this help you too.

MDT 2010 is coming…

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Team, announced yesterday on their blog (MDT Team Blog) than the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 (MDT 2010) beta versions, should be made available on the middle of January, through Microsoft Connect website (link).

Among other changes and new things, MDT 2010 will have:
- Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
- Deployment Workbench and script architecture improvements
- Documentation improvements

Because this is still the start, remember that all our feedback is very important for the MDT Team, and a chance to work close with them to help make a better final product.