Thursday, March 7, 2013

SCCM 2012 SP1 OSD changes

Microsoft has changed the way how Operating System Deployment works in SCCM 2012 SP1 to improve Windows 7 and Windows 8 deployments.
All the new things in SCCM SP1 are described HERE , just look for Operating System Deployment.

One important thing to know is that build and capture works now different and OS deployment with Setup.exe is not supported any more.
How to build and deploy Windows 7 using SCCM 2012 SP is already covered in these two blogs and i'm not going to describe it again.
http://www.toolzz.com/?p=879
http://scug.be/sccm/2013/01/13/configmgr-sp1-windows-7-deployment-is-not-supported-anymore-from-the-setup-exe/

I'd like to highlight a few operating system deployment failures when using autogenerated vanilla SCCM 2012 SP1 task sequences.

when you create your Build&Capture Task Sequence from the menu, you'll get the following format disk step




Before you'll go and capture your image, do not forget to add "Fix C drive" step, as mentioned in the blogs above. You must set task sequence variable OSDPreserveDriveLetter to false if you want your Windows 7 to be running from C-drive.


When you capture the image when the disk was formatted in this way, your WIM will contain two partitions





let's create out-of-the-box deployment task sequence with default settings ;)

point to the Windows 7 image, we've created in the previous step and pay attention to the Image section


If you've chosen "All Images", then you probably should read futher...

just click through the next windows to finish the TS creation.

And here we are, this is our vanilla deployment task sequence


unfortunately, if you'll run it just like this, it will most likely fail :(
Please note: if you've left check-box"configure TS to use with BitLocker" switched on, it may also fail, but due to a different reason which is outside the scope of this post. to make sure your test deployment won't fail on BitLocker steps - remove, disable or set "continue if failed" for "Enable BitLocker" step.

Failure 1. TS fails with 0x8000FFFF error just a few seconds after launch.



Cause - wrong partition sizing

Let's take a close look at Format disk step





When the WIM image was selected ConfigManager inherited the disk geometry from the image. The step is failing even if it is running on the same system where i've created the image!
THIS IS REALLY BAD! 
This is like we are back in 90's when cloning disks using some tools was suffering from incompatibility between different disk types. In my opinion it must be fixed by Microsoft.
Solution is quiet simple - change partition size from fixed size to 100% or what ever you want and this problem is solved.

Failure 2. TS fails with 0x80004005 error when applying data image


Cause -Apply Data Image step configuration
Look at the destination configuration



Solution:
- you have to either get rid of this step at all or at least disable it for now
- or you have to change the destination to target to the right disk and partition.