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I have been googling around all day trying to figure out what the best approach to this is, or if there even is one.

Goal - Quickly image a PC from our Network.

Current Setup - Currently, we have disk duplicators that we plug a bunch of hard drives into and duplicate a source drive to multiple target drives.

So, we have our customers image on a hard drive and grab whichever hard drive we need to duplicate.

Issues - Here are some of the issues that I am trying to overcome, but having trouble finding the answers

  • Since we have multiple disk images that we need to image onto PC's, I was thinking since we have a server that we are decommissioning I would like to re-purpose it to store all of our customer disk images and then hook into the network and pull the image from the server onto the PC. Is this possible? what would be the proper method to go about doing this? Can I do this with MDT?

  • If the above will not work, another option would be having a fixed station that I can swap the hard drive out of and then MDT through the network to another terminal. What is a good resource for instructing me to do this?

Adjit
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1 Answers1

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MDT has been designed for advanced remote deployment without the need to make custom WIM images.

If you have an OS setup that your duplicating then you can image capture the HDD/SDD and deploy that image with WDS. WDS is for network image deployment via PXE (with optional domain joining upon completion).

Image Capture.bat (if you have already configured the installed OS)

imagex /capture X:\path\to\Stuff\to\image Y:\Path\to\output\image\file.wim "image name" "description of image"

  • Where X:\path\to... is the location of the files you want to capture to a WIM file. This can be the root of a drive (H:\ for example) to image capture the entire drive.
  • Y:\Path\to... is where the WIM file will appear.
  • "Image name" is the name of the image once it is in the WIM file.
  • "description of image" is text appended to an image for ease of identification (WIM files can have more than one image in them)

Check out imagex /capture /? for more customization of your image (E.G. compression)

Deploying captured image with WDS:

Simply import the captured image into WDS as an install image to be able to deploy it (this assumes you have a boot image and are familiar with how to deploy with WDS.)

TL;DR:

MDT is most likely not in your best interest as you can't deploy the application separately from the OS.

Elliot Huffman
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