Windows 7 Lite Touch Image Build Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Preparing the Environment

To follow along through this walkthrough, make sure you have the following environment (or something similar) set up:

• Reference computer to build the Windows 7 install. 
• Technician computer with MDT 2010 and Windows AIK 2.0 installed.

Creating a Deployment Share

Open the Deployment Workbench on your technician computer, then right-click on the Deployment Shares node and select New Deployment Share. The New Deployment Share wizard starts. Click the Browse button and create a folder named DeploymentShare$ in the root of your disk volume:

Click Next and the share name will automatically be populated and the UNC path to the share will be displayed:

Click Next and give your deployment share a descriptive name:

Click Next and choose whether you want to be able to capture an image after deploying it to a computer. We will leave this option enabled so we can use it if we deploy a reference (master) computer and capture its image for deployment onto multiple target (end-user) computers:

Click Next and specify whether the user should be allowed to set the password for the local Administrator account on their computer. We'll leave this option unchecked:

Click Next and specify whether the user should be asked to enter a product key. We will leave this unchecked because we are deploying Windows 7 Enterprise, which means that activation is typically performed using Key Management Service (KMS):

Now finish the wizard and review the Confirmation page to ensure everything was done as expected. Figure 7 shows the newly created deployment share and its folder structure in the Deployment Workbench:

Configuring the Deployment Share

To add an operating system, right-click on the Operating Systems node in the deployment share and select Import Operating System. This starts the Import Operating System Wizard. On the first page of the wizard, specify that you want to import a full set of source files:

Insert your Windows 7 Enterprise product media into the DVD drive of your technician computer and browse to select the DVD:

Click Next and the wizard skips ahead to the Destination page. Specify a descriptive name for the folder where the source files will be imported to on your technician computer

Finish the wizard. The import process may take several minutes to complete. Once it is done and you select the Operating Systems folder in your deployment share, the imported OS is displayed.

 

At this point you would add out-of-box drivers, packages and applications to your deployment share as needed.

Creating a Task Sequence

Now let us create a task sequence. A task sequence is a series of steps that are performed during deployment. We want to create a task sequence that will install Windows 7 Enterprise onto a bare-metal target computer. To do this, right-click on the Task Sequences folder in your deployment share and select New Task Sequence. This launches the New Task Sequence Wizard. On the first page of the wizard, specify a task sequence ID (no spaces), task sequence name, and comments as desired:

Click Next and select Standard Client Task Sequence from the list of available task sequence templates:

 Base the new task sequence on the Standard Client template

Click Next and select Windows 7 Enterprise, which is the only imported OS at this point:

Click Next and select the option to not specify a product key in the task sequence:

Do not specify a product key in the task sequence when deploying volume-licensed media and using KMS activation

Click Next and specify the name of the user who will be using the computer and your organization name and website/internet:

Click Next and specify a password for the local Administrator account on the target computer:

Finish the wizard. The new task sequence is displayed in the Task Sequences folder of your deployment point:

Updating the Deployment Share

Now we need to update our deployment share. Updating a deployment share does several things, one of which being the creation of customized version of the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) that can be used to deploy the operating system using the task sequence. Specifically, updating the deployment share in this example creates the following Windows PE images in the C:\DeploymentShare$\Boot folder on your technician computer:

• LiteTouchPE_x64.iso – Used to manually deploy Windows 7 Enterprise x64 onto a bare-metal system.
• LiteTouchPE_x64.wim – Used to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise x64 onto a bare-metal system using Windows Deployment Services.
• LiteTouchPE_x86.iso – Used to manually deploy Windows 7 Enterprise x86 onto a bare-metal system.
• LiteTouchPE_x86.wim – Used to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise x86 onto a bare-metal system using Windows Deployment Services.

To update your deployment share, right-click on it and select Update Deployment Share. This launches the Update Deployment Share Wizard:

Leave the default options selected and finish the wizard. It may take some time to create the Windows PE images on your technician computer. Once the wizard finishes, burn the LiteTouchPE_x86.iso file onto a CD as you will need it to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise x86 onto your target computer.

Note:
On the Confirmation page of this wizard (and on all MDT 2010 wizards) there are two buttons:

• Save Output – saves the output of the wizard to a text file (actually it's better to save it as .rtf as it's more readable that way).
• View Script – displays the underlying Windows PowerShell commands that are executed by the wizard.

As an example of the second, the View Script output from the Update Deployment Share Wizard looks like this:

Add-PSSnapIn Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn
New-PSDrive -Name "DS001" -PSProvider MDTProvider -Root "C:\DeploymentShare$"
update-MDTDeploymentShare -path "DS001:" -Verbose