Capture/Deploy Bootable WinPE (MDT) Partition using Casper/Winclone

[rweaver]

Hi folks,

I come from a dual-platform environment where I create/maintain lab images for both dual-boot Macs and regular old Windows PCs. I'd really prefer not to maintain a separate image for the Macs, so I'd like to use MDT for Windows imaging. However, I'd also really like to access MDT from a small partition on the Mac's hard drive rather than from CD, since carting an armload of CDs from lab to lab would be a pain. In summary, I want to:

1. Deploy my MDT LiteTouch WIM (or ISO files) to a small partition on my iMac
2. Capture the partition using WinClone
3. Deploy the WinClone image using Casper Suite

I had something working several months ago using DeployStudio for both NTFS capture and deployment, but I just can't seem to get it going with WinClone 4/Casper. Is anyone successfully doing this (or something similar) who could share their instructions?

Thanks!

[Kumarasinghe]

We use SCCM to image Windows without any SCCM boot CDs.

This is the workflow. You might need to do thorough testing and planning (identify partitions, pans which partition to put Windows...etc) prior to this.

1. Create task sequence to make a SCCM Prestage and make sure you have shutdown at the end

2. Create a small FAT32 partition on the Mac

3. Boot from SCCM boot CD and run the tasks sequence previously created to put the SCCM prestage media into the FAT32 partition (Task Sequence has to be properly configured to install the tasks on correct partition) and shut down

4. Capture the SCCM Prestage image using Winclone Pro and make it self-extracting one

5. Create PKG of the .winclone with a postflight script to extract it to a specific partition (e.g- disk identifier disk0s4) - using winclone.perl restore command
   http://twocanoes.com/support/winclone/deploying-a-bootcamp-partition-with-winclone-and-apple-remote-...

6. Create a policy with that PKG with a manual trigger

7. Image with a Casper workflow which makes a FAT32 partition (e.g. disk0s4) at imaging time and call that manual trigger from a PostImage script (runs at Reboot) to extract winclone image to it (e.g. disk0s4)

We couldn't image the .winclone image directly from Casper imaging as it will only give a blinking cursor error. That's why we had to follow steps 5, 6, 7 instead. (You might not have this issue in Winclone 4 but we are on Winclone 3 at the moment)

So we don't have to use CDs anymore to boot into SCCM .

[rweaver]

Thanks, Kumarasinghe. I'm going to be building out SCCM for our institution soon, but we're not quite there yet. Right now, we just image with MDT.

Does anyone know whether there's a way to do something similar with MDT? I was able to create a WinPE partition that WinClone recognized (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff794250(v=winembedded.60).aspx.aspx)), but when I boot to it after imaging, it isn't able to load winpeshl.exe.