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 (18 chapters)
Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Troubleshooting USMT


Troubleshooting USMT is very easy, as many error messages are very descriptive. First you should examine the console output for errors.

Next you should use the /v:5 argument on ScanState, LoadState, and UsmtUtils to get most of the details in the log file. The ScanState and LoadState debug logs—when run with verbosity /v:5—contain the information needed to diagnose nearly all USMT failures that get past the console error phase. Key to understanding the logs is examining normal working scenarios versus logs which encounter errors. With this method, errors will be much more obvious and easier to understand. Like all debug logs, some entries can appear to report errors, which are actually expected and not problematic. Not comparing the log with a working version can result in going down the wrong path.

If you still encounter errors, you can enable a special (optional) diagnostic log to determine which migration units are detected and chosen. To activate this log you need...