Build and Capture headaches resolved

[MichaelMaher]

Alright, I am self-taught on SCCM 2007. Someone else manages our software distribution, and I jumped in to handle OSD.

 

I had been having a heck of a time getting Windows 7 to deploy to our Dell Latitude fleet of laptops, including E6400, E4300, E5420, and E6520. My biggest issue was that I was getting a D: drive for the system drive instead of C: like I expected.

 

I fell into some pitfalls. I was deploying from the Install.wim from the Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 x64 DVD. I had done this because it seemed to be the only way I could get Windows to install with my build and capture.

 

I had tried to use an installation package, but it didn't work. I kept bombing during the Setup windows and ConfigMgr step right after the drivers were applied from my driver packages (I created driver packages from the Dell packages for each of my laptop models.)

 

After banging my head against the wall forever, I found the problem and got a solution.

 

Problem: The task sequence for Build and Capture didn't like my driver packages. I don't know why!

 

Solution: I had to disable the drivers task sequence step during the build and capture. Use an installation package pointing at the directory with my DVD extract. The Build and Capture task sequence completed successfully. After the successful capture, I created an OS image package from the captured WIM file. I deployed the image using a task sequence that allowed automatic driver installation (the same step I disabled previously in the build and capture), and it worked like a charm with all drivers installed.

 

Lesson learned: Installing from an installation package doesn't always like drivers, and might crash if it is fed the wrong one. Using an old machine for the capture that had enough drivers for network/storage built into the Windows 7 media is good enough.

 

 

 

I hope this helps someone so that they don't repeatedly bang their heads against walls like I did!

[Mikey C]

Hi Michael

 

One tip i hope helps, despite the fact we are quite a large organisation with 15,000 computers over a large area and with a number of large VM infrastructures, we always build and capture on virtual PCs using the free Virtual Box software.

 

The reason is that out of the box, all flavours of Windows have the drivers required already in the OS, so no extra drivers required. Also NEVER add the build and capture device to a domain, it will come back to bight you in the future - Best just add to a workgroup, however this will mean in some cases the device cannot get Software Updates - so you should also add a server locator point role to one of you SCCM servers.

 

Hope this helps!