Category: NZTekonverse -> Uncategorised

We have successfully completed our first ever mass deployment of computers using the Native Boot VHD technology of Windows 7. This article carries additional detail of the deployment phase of this project. The average transfer rate for the 15 GB VHD over the network was around 45-55 MB per minute equating to around 4-5 hours…

D-Day is Deployment Deadline Day. D-Day is also the day where I have had a record amount of trouble with my work computer, which has had to be restarted twice so far, firstly when Explorer crashed and wouldn’t restart, and then the second time Windows Live Writer wouldn’t load. The process of getting from a…

File and registry virtualisation in Windows 7 and Vista is a new technology that deals with the requirement of some applications to be able to write data in locations where the user does not have access permissions, as well as the user inadvertently choosing these locations. The latter functionality in particular can trip you or…

This article is mainly focused on the issues which come with the migration for the user experience, as opposed to the task of getting new hardware or upgrading older hardware and installing the operating system on it. There are challenges which come with differences in the operating systems and the configuration settings that apply to…

Last year I spent a great deal of time learning how to use MDT. And it seemed like a good system. It worked well and there were only a few hiccups with it. Suddenly this year it is proving to be a great deal of trouble and I’m wondering why I bothered with it. Firstly,…

The steps for deploying a native VHD boot are the same as if you are using a third party imaging solution, such as Ghost. Effectively, copying a VHD is a kind of third party imaging solution, in that it is not a directly supported deployment scenario for the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, its predecessor Business Desktop…

The first time startup with the sysprepped VHD went reasonably well until an error message was displayed: After that the system was stuck in an endless loop of displaying messages which basically said “Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation”. Then the system would restart and, you…

OK so we start up Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) and create a deployment share, which is in my Setup share (where all the other setup files and images are stored). AIK uses something similar to MDT; as far as I can tell, MDT adds a few folders to a basic AIK deployment share. I’ve…

My first test was to set up the target computer with its hard disk and boot environment and copy the VHD directly from the VM to the target and then boot. This was successful; the main issues being the missing Sysprep and driver injection stages. Since then, thinking about it overnight, I have decided I…

Having discussed this lengthily in a previous series of posts it’s time to start working on a real world implementation – and by the way, happy new year! The following steps should be those needed to set up a Native Boot VHD from scratch: Develop the image Create a new VHD and attach it to…