Imaging hard drives for deployment

[russm]

We just got a shipment of SSDs in to replace older 5400rpm drives in netbooks, and I was wondering if it is possible to pre-image them, before putting them into the netbooks? Then when they get put into the netbooks, they'll finish the process and get named and everything.

[NickolajA]

I'm not aware of any easy method for this. Instead, have a look at the Replace scenario where you simply leverage the USMT tools in your task sequence to save the user state. And when the SSD have been put in the machine, you deploy the OS again with another task sequence that will essentially restore the user data and settings.

 

The process you're describing sounds like the old method of "ghosting" a machine.

[russm]

Similar to ghosting a machine.. I'd like to do the first part of the task sequence to a hard drive, so it doesn't have to transfer the image over.. even on SSD's the process is quite slow on older netbooks... and I have to do 5 carts of 40. Just looking for a quicker solution.

[phil_w]

From the sounds of it what you need to use is a Prestaged Media Task Sequence which does exactly that, though personally I found the way it works extremely confusing at first.

 

You create prestaged media (Software Library -> Task Sequences -> Create Task Sequence Media -> Prestaged Media), from your existing OSD Task Sequence, which gives you a wim file. You then need to apply this wim file to the disk of the target machine.

 

You can create a new task sequence to apply the wim file to a disk, using the Apply Data Image step rather than Apply Operating System Image, or just do this offline with imagex.

There is a blog post on Technet which goes into detail on how to create a task sequence to do this, and provides an importable template task sequence for applying a prestaged wim file.

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/system_center_configuration_manager_operating_system_deployment_support_blog/archive/2014/04/02/how-to-apply-task-sequence-prestaged-media-on-multi-partitioned-disks-for-bios-or-uefi-pcs-in-system-center-configuration-manager.aspx

 

What then happens is, when you turn on the machine that has had the prestaged image applied it boots into your boot image just like it would from PXE or boot media and presents you with a list of task sequences as usual. If you pick the task sequence that has been prestaged, the task sequence will just skip over the apply operating system image step because it's already been done.