News and Updates An important update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released. This update fixes a boot loop issue. Download the update here. In this article as with my previous ones we will walk through installing and configuring Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to build and capture a reference image of Windows 10 21H2 using a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. It’s assumed that you have a server or PC ready to install MDT and create a file share for MDT to build the image with.

News and Updates An important update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released. This update fixes a boot loop issue. Download the update here There is no x86 version of Windows 11 This article is based on Windows 11 21H2 22000.258. I will update it in future as things progress In this article as with my previous ones we will walk through configuring Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to deploy the reference image created in the previous article: Build and Capture Windows 11 21H2 Reference Image

A quick guide on how to install Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 10 and Windows 11

News and Updates Update: 2021-11-12 After testing, a Build and Capture Task Sequence now appears to work and sysprep works as expected. An important update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released. This update fixes a boot loop issue. Download the update here There is no x86 version of Windows 11. This article is based on Windows 11 21H2 22000.258. I will update it in future as things progress.

Configurable Script for Creating On-Prem Active Directory User Accounts I’ve completely re-written this utility to make it easier and simpler to use. You can now configure multiple groups for the users to be added to on creation and the sam account names are generated randomly from the names list CSV file. The utility is intended to create a lot of users very quickly. By default usernames are first name and a three digit number and passwords are also generated randomly by the script.

This post is a cut down version of this one and only focusses on Windows 11 for clarity. Important note! A “provisioned app” is an app that is a part of the Windows 11 installation and will be available for all users. Otherwise the app is only installed for the currently logged on user. To remove apps for all future users and the currently logged on user, you must remove both types of app.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility I’ve (finally) added the option to specify the port for the SMTP server. If not configured it will use the default of port 25. 2021-08-10: Version 21.08.10 Added an option to specify the Port for SMTP communication. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here. Support My Work If you would like to support me, please check out the links below.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Since implementing support for 7-Zip it has added a whole load of additional possibilities to test for. This has created some difficulties for me, however I have been hard at work and have believe I’ve tackled the problem by introducing a formal testing process (and mostly automated it) in order to test some popular possible configs. You should be able to use any option that 7-zip supports, although currently the only options I’ve tested fully are ‘-t’ archive type, ‘-p’ password and ‘-v’ split files.

Automate Creation of WIM Files Just a small update to this utility. Some tidying up of code and added a progression bar so you can see at a glance how far through the list of TS ID’s the script is. 2021-06-22: Version 21.06.22 Added a progression bar display. Changed a variable to prevent conflicts with future PowerShell versions. Image Factory Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Just a small update to add the ability to use any 7-zip command line option with the utility. 2021-06-14: Version 21.06.14 Replaced -Sz* specific options with -SzOptions which will support any option that 7-zip supports. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here. Support My Work If you would like to support me, please check out the links below.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility A bug fix update. When using archive types other than zip, the backup files were not being moved from the working directory to the final backup location. Thanks to @gabfot1 on Twitter for the bug report. 2021-06-02: Version 21.06.02 Fixed an error where file types which are not .zip were not being moved from the working directory to the final backup location. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from:

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Another substantial update. I’ve added the ability to support 7-Zip’s split file function and due to wanting to support for 7-Zip’s other file formats I’ve had to make the difficult decision to alter how the configuration switches are handled. This means that this updated script may not be a simple drop in replacement if you are using a previous version with 7-Zip features. The biggest change is that when using 7-Zip features you will need to add an additional hyphen ‘-’ to the configuration.

News and Updates An update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released: This update fixes a boot loop issue. Details on how to install it are on Michael Niehaus' blog post here and you can download the fix here. Installation instructions will also be in the walkthrough below. NOTE: If you have existing shares you will need to copy the files from the extracted update to %DeployRoot%\Tools and overwrite the existing files in all shares.