This has taken a break because I have been very busy with other things. However I had a look at it at home last night and used Wim2VHD to make a VHD containing Windows 7 Enterprise x86. I then copied it to a portable HDD and took it to work this morning. I think the main error I made is that the system partition on the computer has to be set as Active (i.e. boot partition). This makes sense as it will be booted by the Bios and it then runs the bootloader to get Windows started. The “active” name is very poorly chosen for its function. Once I made that change with Diskpart BCDEdit suddenly started working and I could see that it was configured to boot the VHD. Once the VHD had been copied to the computer and restarted it immediately booted the VHD and after going through the usual first time steps it is now fully functioning. I noticed that D drive is attached and this is actually the physical hard disk with the files present on it. Since we can’t remove drive D we would look to limit access to it by ordinary users and provide them with another VHD as drive E for any scratch space.
I have also tried VHD Attach at home and it works well with attaching files as drives after the computer has booted up so that should be OK. The next thing is to work out how to add drivers to an image that has been sysprepped so it can automatically load them when the computer starts with the new VHD image. There are a couple of ideas out of all that I have looked at: test if MDT can do this as part of a sysprep task, or use DISM to service the image by adding drivers to it. I think MDT uses DISM to perform the inject task anyway. So the next part of this series will hopefully be wrapping up these options.
It turns out from examining the documentation that DISM is very easy to use with a VHD file. If you have the VHD mapped to a drive letter you just have to open a command prompt and type a few simple commands. If I have my platform drivers all nicely imported into MDT I can just pass the root folder to DISM and tell it to extract all the drivers from it, for example (if my VHD has drive letter V and my MDT path is on drive S:)
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DISM /image:V: /Add-Driver /driver:S:drivers /recurse
Then, in totality, my deployment process may well end up looking something similar to the following:
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Develop the image on a VHD using a virtual machine
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Run MDT sysprep only task to sysprep the VHD
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Run DISM as noted above
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Copy the VHD for deployment.
Ideally a future release of MDT would automate these steps in a task sequence.
The steps to set up a physical machine would be different and I would like to see if they can be scripted in some form.