How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 7

Ok, break time is over yo….

Step 5 The Task Sequence magic

So lets do another properties on our Task Sequence and go to the “OS Info” tab, which will look like this:

Click “Edit Unattend.xml”

Now this is why I (we, you are following along right?) selected an x86 version of 7 to do the console in…

x64 imagex.exe can’t catalog a x86 WIM.  No really, its documented here.

The important bit:

Different binary versions of Windows SIM cannot create catalog files for some Windows images of different architecture types. We recommend using the 32-bit version of Windows SIM to create catalog files because this version can create catalogs for all Windows image architecture types. The following list describes the Windows SIM architecture types and catalogs that can be created for each Windows image architecture type.

• x86 Image Manager. Can create catalogs for x86, x64, and Itanium-based Windows images.
• x64 Image Manager.Can create catalogs only for x64 Windows images.
• Itanium-based Image Manager.Can create catalogs only for Itanium-based Windows images.

So, the take-away here is always use a x86 host and you don’t have to worry about not being able to catalog a WIM.

That brings us to this screen:

So lets do some fun stuff…

My kids will likely want all games, so lets make them available at install.  (you may want the reverse, that’s just as easy)

And then search for games (you didn’t think I had all this memorized did you?)

Double click “InboxGames” and then voila, it adds the setting to the unattend.xml for you:

Ah, already enabled….why?  It’s Home Premium not Professional.  You probably are seeing it a little different.  But that’s the basics of how to do stuff in unattend.xml.  Do a find, find the setting, add it and set it.

ONE TRICK, if you have a pesky video driver that can’t figure out his resolution and you end up with a widescreen laptop without a widescreen resolution at deploy, you can set the resolution to 0 and force it to AutoDetect at the driver level, just an fyi.

So once we’re done with the unattend.xml, we’re ready to fire up a task sequence in a VM and do a capture, applying updates and whatnot!