Need Help Migrating from Ghost to MDT 2012

[brink668]

I have been working for a company for a while almost a year and we have been using Ghost to image the machines. This has been very good and has worked very reliably for the company for many years. However, recently I have been encountering a lot of issues due to drivers, especially since we now have a lot of new Lenovo Laptops and various other models besides Dell now. Basically we have 1 Master Image with every driver on it for all the different models we have about 10 models or so.

 

I really could use the help with this, I have been very quiet but I have read a lot of posts, forums, articles and watched countless videos just not sure what I actually need and if it is even possible.

 

 

What I want (future)

• Migrate from Ghost to MDT easily without loosing all the work that was done to make the current images.
• MDT because managing drivers appears easier and more precise; so the correct model and driver should always be used and installed.
• PXE Boot / Light Touch or Zero Touch
• Windows 7 and Windows 8 Imaging Only no XP

 

The Current Setup.

• Dedicated Local Gigabit Network for Ghosting which includes
• Server 2003 running DHCP, DNS and Ghost
• Our Images are stock full of customization and changes. I do not want to re-create / re-install all these applications again.

Problems:

• Drivers get installed on computer that it can't use or doesn't belong to
• No DOS drivers for lenovo laptops have to remove drive and image manually.

 

Since our images are very customized already with lots of oracle configuration changes that have been made specifically for our environment how can I preserve this image and migrate it to MDT without having to re-do all this customization? Would this even be possible?

 

 

 

 

I have the following software available to me:

-Windows Server 2008R2 and Server 2012

-SCCM 2012 don't really want to use it... little big I think!

-Windows 7

[winoutreach5]

First off, congratulations on deciding to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit! Judging from your list of things you want, MDT will be able to meet all of your needs very easily. While MDT can be used for all deployments, including Windows XP, you will also be able to use it for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Through your research you may have already discovered that you can integrate MDT with Windows Deployment Services (WDS) which can help streamline deployment by allowing you to push images out via PXE boot.

 

A good place to start when it comes to drivers and using the driver storage feature within MDT is with this blog post from the Windows Server Core team.

Presuming your image files are in WIM file format, you should be able to import the desired WIM files into your deployment share within MDT and then create associated task sequences with all necessary settings.

 

You may have already seen them but I always recommend the following videos from the Springboard Series on TechNet to become more familiar with imaging and deployment using MDT:

 

· Deployment Day Session 1: Introduction to MDT 2012

· Deployment Day Session 2: MDT 2012 Advanced

 

Hope this helps and please keep me posted on your progress and any questions you may come across!

 

Jessica
Windows Outreach Team – IT Pro

[Oneone]

nice thx for those links win!

[brink668]

Thanks for the information!

 

I am reviewing this now (I also have SCCM 2012 built) so I may harness the power of that as well plus I heard the task sequences are a bit easier than MDTs version.