Everything is working fine in your main office, you capture, you deploy, you migrate, but you have a bunch of small branch offices (10-20 PC’s) with limited bandwidth where you need to do the same thing. Well…you could just tell the people in those offices to leave their desktops and laptops on and deploy or migrate those over night, but still there are a lot of GB to transfer. The second thing is that not all of those workers can leave their laptops at the office, or they just don’t want to, who knows… An investment in a server is out of the question, maybe later. So how can you deploy using MDT those PC’s in those branch offices ? The answer is:
create a deployment media where you put all the operating systems, drivers, applications you need for those PC’s and use this DVD to deploy those systems. Now let me show you how to create this MDT media. I will use MDT 2013 for this demo.
I presume you have your applications,
your OS’s,
and your drivers imported in MDT. I recommend to be very granular and create a folder for every platform, OS type, OS version, because it will help you so much later on.
Besides those, I also presume you have your Task Sequences created and ready to rule.
Now expand Advance Configuration, right-click Selection Profiles and choose New Selection Profile. By creating a Selection Profile you control what’s included in the deployment media and what’s injected in the OS during the task sequence.
Give the Selection Profile a name and hit Next.
Here is the screen where you select what to include in the media. Now you see why I told you earlier to be granular with the folders. Since I want to deploy only Windows 7 and Windows 8 in those branch offices I will select only these OS’s and task sequences. If you select a root of the folder here and later on you create another folder under it in the Deployment Workbench and import OS’s, application, drivers or what have you, this folder (or subfolder we may cal it) will be automatically included in the selection profile.
At the Summary screen click Next to save the changes, then hit Finish to close the wizard.
And a new Selection Profile is created.
If you forgot or you need to add a new task sequence later on, you can modify this Selection Profile by opening its properties.
Now that we have a selection profile for our branch offices computers it is time to create a deployment media. Right-click the Media folder and choose New Media.
Give it a path where to save the media content but, do NOT, I repeat do NOT save it in your deployment share. The Selection profile drop-down-box is the important part here. If you click it, you should see the Selection Profile created earlier. Choose that and click Next.
On the Summary screen click Next and wait a few seconds for the wizard to finish
then close it.
Now you should see the new media created, and if you right-click it and choose Properties, a window similar to the one from the DeploymentShare should pop-up.
The Rules tab is the more interesting one. Here you can use the rules just like in the DeploymentShare, to automate the OS installation.
If you open Bootstrap.ini you can see that there is no root path specified, or credentials to connect to a deployment share. This is because WinPE has all the OS’s, drivers, applications on this media, so no deployment share is needed.
The folder specified during the wizard has the exact same structure as the DeploymentShare but if you take a closer look most of the folders are empty (operating systems, drivers, applications etc).
When you are done editing the rules and options click OK to close the media properties window than right-click the media from the Workbench and choose Update Media Content.
This will create an ISO image with all the OS’s, drivers, applications that you specified in the Selection Profile wizard. Depending on how many operating systems, applications, drivers you selected, the wizard can take a from a few minutes to a few dozen minutes to complete.
At the end hit Finish to close the window.
Now take a look in the root of the folder you specified during the media creation wizard (mine was D:\MDTMedia). You should see an ISO image created that has a few GB in size.
All you have to do now is burn this image to a DVD or Blue Ray media and boot the computers you want to deploy from this media. Select the type of platform and let it load the WinPE environment.
If you did not specified in the Bootstrap.ini to skip this part you will have to do it manually by clicking Run the Deployment Wizard to install a new Operating System.
Select your Task Sequence
and hit Next to begin the deployment.
This is a neat feature of MDT and is heavily used in environments where booting from the network is not an option. Give it a try and see if it works for you.
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77 comments
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HARDEEP SINGH
01/11/2019 at 12:14 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi Adrian,
The whole process got completed, when i boot from the usb it take me to MDt deploymnet and is looking for deployment share path.
Can you suggest what should i do Please
Adrian Costea
09/12/2019 at 17:56 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
I will have to create an article on how to put this on a USB drive because more and more people are asking for it.
I’ll be back with an article.
Dann
31/07/2019 at 17:36 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
I’m trying to create a fully offline USB drive deployment, but the main deployment server doesn’t have enough disk space to hold all the applications. Currently, we create applications as “Application without source files or elsewhere on the network” and not “Application with source files”.
Is there a way to “cheat” around having to copy the application source files to the deployment share, by copying them from the file server directly to the USB drive? Something like creating the application as “Application without source files or elsewhere on the network” and setting the working directory as relative to the USB drive root? Is the working directory based off the deploy root in the bootstrap.ini file (and could I then leave it blank to keep it looking on the USB drive)?
Currently the deployroot is the MDT server, and the working directory for all the application installs is “\\fileserver.domain.foo\application name. If I create a new folder with “copies” of the applications that have a working directory not pointed out at a file server, will it look locally?
Adrian Costea
07/08/2019 at 13:34 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi Dann,
To be honest I don’t know the answer to this because I never tried it. I guess you can copy the application files from your file server on the USB drive on the designated subfolder. So if you have a directory named Firefox under Applications on the Deployment Share, you should copy the source files on the same directory on the USB drive.
Let me know how it goes, if not I will test it myself.
Holly W
24/07/2019 at 16:20 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi Adrian,
Great post! I wonder if you can help, post install of the OS the machine boots into Windows as expected but it then doesn’t continue with the remainder of the Task Sequence (so the Post Install stages where there are some bespoke cmd’s to run locally i.e. Disable the Administrator Account) and so it never actually comes up with a completion screen or any errors, it’s like it just doesn’t continue through the Task Sequence. I have recreated the Task Sequence and Updated the Offline Media many times now…
Also, this wasn’t mentioned in your post, but with a Normal MDT PXE Task Sequence Deploy I edit the Unattend.xml in the Control Folder and Link it to the Operating System in the Deployment Share. I did the same with the Task Sequence and Operating System prior to creating the Offline Media assuming that would transfer as part of the Offline Media creation but it hasn’t. So how does one do OOBE Personalization like creating Local Accounts etc…
Any advise would be appreciated 🙂
Adrian Costea
07/08/2019 at 13:13 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi Holly,
First of all make sure you test your scripts before you add them to MDT. The second thing is to first update the Deployment Share then the Media Content.
If you are still having problems let me know on the Contact page so we can try a remote session and see what’s there.
MarkLester
25/01/2019 at 17:49 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
I did all the steps and everything was deployed (so it seemed). I received 10 errors at the end and unable to get to windows.
I’m hoping there is something simple i missed.
Thank for any help you can provide.
FAILURE (5616 ): 15250: Verify BCDBootEx
Litetouch deployment failed, Return Code = 2147467259 0x80004005
Failed to run the action: 1809
Unknown error (Error: 000015F0; Source: Unknown)
the execution of the gourp (Install) has failed and the execution has been aborted. An action failed
Operation aborted (Error: 800004004; Source: Windows)
Failed to run the last action 1809. Execution of the task sequence failed
Unknown error (Error: 000015F0; Source: Unknown)
Task Sequence Engine failed! code: enExecutionFail
Task sequence execution failed with error code 80004004
SetNamedSecurityinfo() failed
setObjectOwner() failed. 0x80070005.
RegQueryValueExW is unsuccessful for software\micorsoft\SMS\Task Sequence, SMSTSEndProgram
GetTsRegValue() is unsuccessful. 0x80070002.
Error Task Sequence Manager failed to execute task sequence Code 0x8004005
blerg
30/10/2018 at 14:59 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Just wanted to say thank you!
Adrian Costea
05/12/2018 at 09:18 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
You are welcome. Thanks for passing by.
Lis Hawj
13/08/2018 at 19:03 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi,
I have successfully created a offline ISO file using your walk-through. Thank you very much! I do have one lingering question and that is how to split the offline ISO file to fit two 32GB USB drives? I am unable to use ISO to USB because the offline ISO file is too large. Any advice?
Adrian Costea
24/08/2018 at 13:34 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Hi,
Just put in the image the minimal drivers needed for the systems. For applications and the rest of the stuff you can use a deployment software or GPO to install them. This way your offline deployment image will not get over 5 GB.
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