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

Delving into Windows logs


During the operating system deployment process, several logs are created. Depending on what portion of setup phase we are talking about, the location of the logs will move around to different paths and drive letters.

Starting point for troubleshooting basic operating system deployment errors is usually the main setupact.log file. This log keeps track of everything that happens during the deployment process.

Whereas, setuperr.log only contains error entries from the main log file. Very often you will need the information lines before and after the error occurred in order to determine the root cause. So, setuperr.log should be seen as an indicator and cannot be used standalone. If its file size is larger than 0 bytes, take a look at setupact.log:

Note

Whenever possible, you should grab the whole Panther directory. This is typically found under C:\Windows\Panther, including all subdirectories. This directory is often referenced as the Panther logs. The Panther log directory...