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SYSPREP and Capture a workstation using WDT

Monday, 15 August 2016

SYSPREP and Capture a workstation using WDT

I have recently been out at a client who are wanting to create a new SOE image.  This will be 100% used by a USB drive to image machines.  The reason behind this is that the workstations being images are ‘kiosk’ machines which don’t have any network access other than internet, sos it rules out WDS or SCCM deployment.

The client currently has Windows Deployment Toolkit installed, so I have used this to create the SYSPREPed image.  There are a few ‘gotchyas’, so I thought I would blog this process to clear it up.

Desired Outcome
The client would like to setup a workstation and install software on the machine.  Once the software has been installed and everything is up to date,  they’d like to image this machine and deploy it to about ~30 machines across three sites.

Process
The first step is to cleanly install Windows (in this case it’s Windows 10) and make sure it’s fully up to date with Windows Updates.  Once that is done, you can start installing your desired applications and get them up to date as well.

From the WDT server, you are going to be working in the Deployment Workbench.  Assuming that you have already created a new Deployment Share, do the following:

Create a new Task Sequence and set it to Sysprep and Capture


Once this has been created,  go into the Deployment Share location and edit the ClientSettings.ini file.

Change this to the following:
Once you have done that, you are then able to run the commands from the reference computer.  Make sure your user account has access to the share that has been created when you created the deployment share, then map the drive using CMD

.
Net Use * \\ServerName\DeploymentShare$

This will then ask you to authenticate with your domain account.  Once you’ve done that, you can run the following VB Script:

\\ServerName\DeploymentShare\Scripts\LiteTouch.vbs

This will then run and will asks you where you want to save the .WIM file to.  Once you have selected this, you can just kick the capture off and wait for this to complete.  Once this has completed, you now have a sysprepped image that you are able to use for either USB deployment or to import into WDS or SCCM.

I will make another post about imaging the computers at a later time.