MDT Deployment Guide – Part 3

MDT – Operating Systems & Driver imports

This post will show you how to add operating systems to our deployment share as well as drivers.

Right click on the “Operating System” folder and choose “Add Operating System”. We will be adding a Full set of source files for this demonstration (although later on Ill add a post that shows you how to create your own custom image files).

Point it to the directory where your O/S installation files are located. You can either use a CD/DVD or have a folder that has the contents of an iso file extracted. My installation files is an ISO that is mounted to G:

For the destination directory name type a meaningful name (obviously for this I’ve labeled it Windows 7 Pro x64)

It will start copying the files to its Deployment Share directory

Here Ive gone through and pulled in 2 other operating systems in Windows 8.1 Enterprise and Server 2012 R2. If you note below that the Server 2012 import causes 4 OS options. This allows you to choose whether you want to create a Server Standard vs Data Center install and whether you want it in GUI or Core mode for either. This guide will only be dealing with a Windows 8.1 installation but I will focus on Server deployment via MDT at a later date.

The next part is the driver import wizard. Here Ive gone and created different folders to help separate out driver types. Now there is no wrong or right way to do this as long as you have consistency in your folder structure. I use the following layout OS -> Bit -> Make -> Model. So my folder structure for the driver container would be:

• Windows 7
  • x64
    • HP
      • HP EliteBook Revolve 810 Pro
      • HP EliteDesk 8200
      • HP ElitePad 900
    • Dell
      • Dell Optiplex 780
      • Dell Latitude 640
• Windows 8.1
  • x64
    • HP
      • HP EliteBook Revolve 810 Pro
      • HP EliteDesk 8200
      • HP ElitePad 900
    • Dell
      • Dell Optiplex 780
      • Dell Latitude 640

 

As you can see below I have my driver container laid out.

We can then right click on the folder in particular and choose “Import Drivers”. Select the location of the drivers and MDT will recurse through the sub folders picking out all the driver files it can find. Do this for each Device model in your environment. For this demonstration however I have uploaded just the network drivers for an HP Laptop and the Hyper-V integration drivers for 2012 R2 (since I’m building this in a virtual environment). They wont be necessary for Windows 8.1/Server 2012 R2 installs but would be necessary for previous versions if we wanted to deploy on our Hyper-V platform.

You will see the progress and any issues that arise would be displayed here

And that brings us to the end of this post. As you can see below our drivers are imported and our container structure is laid out in a methodical layout. Once again how you decide to do your container structure is entirely up to you, just try to keep it consistent and you will be fine.

Once you have finished importing all the required drivers for your environment we need to update the MDT boot image. To do this we right click on MDT Deployment Share and choose “Update”.

Optimize will just add the missing drivers to an existing image, where as “completely regenerate” will obviously do exactly what it says. An optimisation might only take 1-2 mins where as a regenerate might take anywhere between 5-10mins.

Check out your progress and the last page will show a log of what you have done

 

Our next post will look at how to import applications for deployment.