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Background

I work with point of sale terminals that are windows based machines. In order to image a customers terminal, we have a copy of their OS on an external SSD and we remove the drive from the POS terminal and use a duplicator to copy the image from the external SSD then pop it back in the terminal and its ready to go.

I know it is possible to use MDT but Im not too sure on the steps to take. Considering this is such a simple set up Im not sure which steps I can skip or dont necessarily need.

Goal

To have the customers OS on the external SSD uploaded into the MDT computer and anytime we need to image a terminal, hook it up to the MDT computer and just deploy it. Can anyone speak to this process? Concretely I would like to know the steps I can skip and which ones to follow to the T.

Mangster
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  • If this is really as simple as you suggest have you considered a basic (hardware) hard drive duplicator like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0Y5-0001-00014&cm_re=hard_drive_duplicator-_-0Y5-0001-00014-_-Product – Tim Brigham Oct 12 '15 at 17:06
  • The whole idea is to not remove the drive. At least thats what were striving for. – Mangster Oct 13 '15 at 14:35

2 Answers2

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MDT has been designed for remote deployment (going to the system that needs imaged).

Your situation sounds like local deployment (bringing the computer/HDD to you). In that case I would personally use a tool called imagex (a part of ADK/AIK). It is a command line tool that can manipulate WIM files.

I would personally use a batch script that would automatically deploy the image to the drive that is hooked to the computer. Here is an example:

Deploy.bat

imagex /apply X:\Path\to\WIM\File.wim Y Z:\Path\to\apply\image\to bootsect /nt60 Z:

  • Where X is the drive with the WIM file.
  • Y is the image index
  • Z:\path... is where you want to deploy the image. It does not have to be in a folder you can make it at the root of a drive like this H:\ and that will deploy to the root of the H: drive.
  • Use /nt52 for NTLDR compatible boot sector setup
  • /nt60 is for BOOTMGR compatible boot loaders

If you were to do remote deployments (like from a CD, DVD, USB, PXE, etc...), just configure the deployment to use your image. It will take care of everything else. You do not need to delete any entries as they will auto disable depending on the type of imaging operation.

If you want to deploy remotely using non PXE methods then here is a link on how to put the MDT system on physical media (CD, DVD, BD, USB, etc...), It is for deployment but you can easily change it for other operation types (image capture, etc...)

http://www.vkernel.ro/blog/creating-an-offline-mdt-deployment-media

TL;DR:

It sounds like a batch script will suit your needs better.

Elliot Huffman
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MDT utilises WDS on Windows Server, so you'd need to have a a VM with this all set up. You'd need to create a WIM image of the OS and put that into WDS.

There's not really a need to use MDT unless all the POS systems are different in terms of manufacturer, hardware etc. You could use WDS on it's own.

You'd also need to have a DHCP server which would provide the PXE boot option to boot into WinPE.

Have a read of this for more info:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/jj648426.aspx

StrattonL
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