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

Driver Verifier


Driver Verifier (or verifier.exe) has been native to Windows since Vista and can be used to test particular drivers in Windows or test the entire image's hardware drivers for stability tests. It even inserts debugging information into the memory dumps that are generated by its tests to help pinpoint the root cause of a particular driver problem:

  1. Driver Verifier is launched by simply typing verifier into an elevated command prompt:

  2. Testing a particular driver is as simple as selecting Next at Create standard settings and then setting the radio button to Select driver names from a list, as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. Then pick the driver(s) you want to test (in this case, storport.sys):

  4. Clicking on Finish results in a window indicating a reboot is needed, after which, the Verifier executes tests against the driver for typical problems in hardware drivers.

If a dump is generated, !verifier in Windows Debugger (WinDbg) would be a starting point for debugging. Defrag...