Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By : Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer
Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By: Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer

Overview of this book

Topic The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) provides a comprehensive collection of tools, processes, and guidance for automating desktop and server deployments. It considerably reduces deployment time and standardizes desktop and server images. Moreover, MDT offers improved security and ongoing configuration management. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the official supported method of creating and customizing Windows images for deployment. Description: Starting from scratch, this book walks you through the MDT setup, task sequence creation, and image deployment steps in detail. Breaking down the various MDT concepts, this book will give you a thorough understanding of the deployment process. Beginning with imaging concepts and theory, you will go on to build a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit environment. You will understand the intricacies of customizing the default user profile in different versions of Windows. Driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations; we’ll cover various driver concepts including mandatory driver profiles. ]Other important topics like the User State Migration Tool (USMT), configuration of XML files, and how to troubleshoot the USMT are also discussed in the book. We will cover the verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. Furthermore, you will learn about MDT web frontend implementation as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. We’ll wrap it all up with some links to resources for more information, blogs to watch, and useful Twitter handles.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
4
4. Default User Profile Customization

UsmtUtils tool


The UsmtUtils tool is used for deleting a hard-link store, validating a compressed file store and extracting data from a compressed file store. Additionally, it can determine cryptographic capabilities of source and destination computer for use with the /encrypt command.

Delete hard-link migration store

Hard-link migration stores cannot be deleted by Windows Explorer or the command prompt. To delete these stores you need to use UsmtUtils with the /rd option.

If the migration store spans multiple volumes, it will be deleted from all volumes. Sometimes the /rd option needs a reboot to delete all files. To override the accept prompt you can specify the /y argument additionally.

Some examples include the following:

  • usmtutils /rd C:\HardLinkStore

  • usmtutils /rd D:\HardLinkStore /y

Verify compressed migration store

You can use the usmtutils.exe /verify argument when you want to validate whether a compressed migration store is OK or contains corrupted files. The /verify argument implements...