Premier Workshops – Windows 7 Deployment

For the next couple of days I’ll be attending a Microsoft Workshop for Premier Clients about Windows 7 Deployment.

Our host will be Rui Cascalheira, a Technical Account Specialist at MSFT Portugal.

I hope to get a lot of information to share here with everyone.

By the way, here are the topics we’ll talk about:

• Technical Highlights
• Understand the WIM File
• Discover the new Setup and Deployment Tools for Windows 7
• Create and Maintain the Windows Deployment Services Role
• Create and Deliver Custom Install Images
• Discover the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
• Hard Link Migration from Windows XP to Windows 7

Windows Deployment Services Error – The System Cannot Find the File Specified

So yesterday I was starting to get crazy with an error I was getting on my WDS virtual machine.

Murphy’s Law was taking all the action and because I needed to finish a production environment image, WDS was refusing to upload a WIM.

This was the error I was getting:

Like the error tells you, the image you’re trying to upload cannot be found/it’s there anymore. …NOT

Despite this error, and after one hour trying to understand what’s going on and googling about this issue I found out that…

It was a simple…insignificant…lake of hard disk space!

Nice…very nice….

Podcast: Windows 7 Deployment Enhancements

A new Microsoft podcast about one of my favorite themes. Deployment!!!

This podcast it’s all about the new features for Windows 7 deployment.

Things like Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images management, dynamic driver provisioning and the new Windows Deployment Services (WDS) are talked here.

Here’s the link for this download:

MS Podcasts: Windows 7 Deployment Enhancements

Documentation for Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2008

Like always, the need for something shows us various paths…

This week after a lot of WDS issues, like always, because of the lack of knowledge, I needed to find some information about how to install a Windows Vista through WDS and not letting it add the machine to the domain.

After a lot of search and talking with ours Microsoft Technical Account Manager (TAM) he gave me this link with very good information regarding Windows Deployment Services:

WDS Role Overview

Hope you enjoy it too!

WDS Error – PXE-E55(…) port 4011

I’ve always tested WDS and MDT using VMware Workstation software.
For those familiarzed with this software, it enables you like Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run Virtual Machines inside your’s. Like for example running a Linux distro, an beta version of Windows. It’s like a sandbox for you to play with.

Today I had to install WDS and MDT on a phisical Server (HP ML310 G4) and tried to PXE boot a desktop (HP DC7800 SFF). After hitting F12 for network boot I’ve got stuck on an error never seen before:

PXE-E55: proxyDHCP service did not reply to the request on port 4011

After some googling I found out the solution and the cause of if.
VMWare has a DHCP server so you don’t need to install it on any machine (the WDS machine for example).
In the case of this phisical server, I had to install WDS and a DHCP Server on Windows 2008.
In this case, for this to work you need to:

- On the WDS+DHCP machine, open registry editor and navigate to:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WDSServer\Providers\WDSPXE and change the value to UseDHCPPorts=0

- Then, open the command-prompt and execute the following command:
WDSUTIL /Set-Server /UseDHCPPorts:No /DHCPOption60:Yes

And everything starts to work pretty well then!

Vista Unattended – KB929399-v2 Deployment Issues

At my job, we should start to deploy Windows Vista to agencies and central branchs next year, and a lot of work must be done.
The redesigned BDD (now known as Microsoft Depoloyment), the redesigned RIS (now known as Windows Deployment Services(WDS)) and Windows Automatic Installation Kit (WAIK), give a lot of new tools and deployment methods that need some comprehensive reading.

So…last week I started to take a more deep look at the Windows Vista Deployment.
After creating a simple answer file, that by the way has changed name and type (unattend.txt/Unattended.xml), I started looking to the new feature that makes possible to install OS hotfixes (system updates and security updates) in a very simple way.
After making some tests with just a couple of hotifxes, I’ve run Windows Update and Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.1 on a reference machine and downloaded all the updates. I’ve then applied the hotfixes via Deployment Workbench (WAIK) and started deploying the image using WDS.

On the Install Update Passe I found an error that was killing the unattended installation:

Setup failed applying image \\S-W2K8WDS-V01\Distribution$\OperationSystems\Windows Vista Ent\Sources\install.wim, rc = 31
ZTI ERROR – Non-zero return code by LTIApply, rc = 31
Non-zero return code executing command “X:\Deploy\Tools\X86\TsmBootstrap.exe” /env:SAStartm, rc = -2147467259

This is a very very generic error, with no reference about what has failed in all log files you can fin, and after a while you will feel lost!
In  my case I had applied 39 hotfixes…
So to understand where the error was, I had to start deploying the hotfixes almost one-by-one to figure out where the bad file was.

After a lot of time I’ve found that the hotfix giving the problem was WindowsMedia11-KB929399-v2-x86-INTL.exe(a Windows Media Player 11 SDK Update).

I’ve Googled a little and found this:
http://www.myitforum.com/forums/m_166236/mpage_1/tm.htm#167364

I’ve not tested it yet!