Mick Huxley

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Share Migration

<** Disclaimer **> I am not going to be describing how the technologies discussed here operate at a high level.  Some prior knowledge of deployment will be required. </** Disclaimer **>

I’ve been working with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit in a lab recently to start testing some image deployment options.  I was running Oracle Virtual Box but found that the boot.sdi (the initial download from WDS during deployment) was taking up to 8 or 9 minutes to download and it’s only about 3MB.

I decided that I would switch to VMWare Workstation.  I am unable to use Virtual PC as I need x64 guests.  The boot.sdi was download in < 3 seconds and the boot.wim also with speed.

To take a step back the environment I am running is very simple. A single deployment server running Windows Server 2008 R2.  This server hosts DNS, ADDS, DHCP, WDS and has the WAIK and MDT 2010 U1 installed. 

Once I had rebuilt the server in VMware Workstation rather then re-creating the work in MDT I simply copied the deployment share from the Virtual Box server to the new VMWare Workstation Server.  This works very well and the deployment share holds all of the configuration data required.  To save time I just added the existing boot.wim to WDS and booted my host.

When presented with the Authentication prompt in PE it failed.   I hit F8 to bring up a command prompt and went straight to the logs at “X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS\Wizard.log” and could see that PE was attempting to hit the path “\\Old-Server\DeploymentShare$”.  Ahh simple I thought, update the deployment share, import the updated boot.wim into WDS and done.

Nope. Did that, same story, checked the logs still trying to connect to “\\Old-Server\DeploymentShare$”  Knowing that this data would be stored in either a text or xml file in the Control directory I jumped on my deployment server and headed to “C:\DeploymentShare\Control”  This is where you can find all of the configuration data for MDT.  First up I cracked the “CustomSettings.ini”, nope nothing.  I then opened “BootStrap.ini” and bingo

[Settings]
Priority=Default

[Default]
DeployRoot=\\Old-Server\DeploymentShare$

But as I’ve learned in the past these config files can be overwritten when updating the deployment share so it’s best to edit them from the MDT.  Opening MDT I hit properties on the Deployment Share and on the “Rules” tab is a button “Edit bootstrap.ini”

Updated the values to “\\New-Server\DeployementShare$”, saved, update deployment share, reboot target and voila all done.

The big takeaways here are.

1. F8 will bring up a command prompt in PE

2. X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS is the place to look for errors

3. Go running through the Control folder in the deployment share and look what you can update

** Tip for young players **

If you are using Windows Live Writer Beta you will need to disable “Replace text emoticons with emoticon graphics” or every time you try and type a drive letter as in C:\ it will come out as C.