Archive for MDT

Microsoft MDT 2012 Update 1 failed ZTIDomainJoin

On a Microsoft MDT 2012 Update 1 installation that had worked during a test period we needed to deploy a new batch of laptops with a different product number as this batch was different from our tests because the fingerprint readers were removed from the device.

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Using the MDT 2012 Update 1 database to configure your deployment

I like to use the MDT 2012 database to store data to configure my servers, a lot of data can be hold in this database to customize and automate your deployment with MDT 2012 and with each release Microsoft adds more possible features and functions to this database. With the transition from MDT 2010 to 2012 Microsoft added a couple of things:

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Using the MDT database: “ZTI error opening SQL Connection. SQL server does not exist or access denied”

For one of my current projects we’re using MDT 2012 Update 1 and we configured the MDT DB using the database wizard as we’re using the MDT database as source for our deployment. It holds host name and IP configuration of the target machines (as we can remove the need to press F12 for PXE with the use of RES Automation Manager 2012 we have a great ZTI solution).

But we ran into a problem when using the database as the targets would use the DB information so they were deployed using the automatically generated hostsnames and based on DHCP. So when looking into the results in the C:\Windows\Temp folder we discovered that we got an error:

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RES Automation Manager, server installations and automated diskpart

When I install servers I like to have a second drive to put data on. In this case we created servers based on ESXi so I created a single disk for the operating system (Windows 2008 R2) and a separate second disk for the data. When deploying via WDS/MDT the OS is installed on the first disk but the second disk had to be formatted and I had to assign a drive letter manual.

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Add Computers Automatically into the MDT Database with Powershell and RES Automation Manager

Yesterday I was at a customer who uses WDS, MDT in combination with RES Automation Manager to roll out Windows 7 workstations. We created a database in MDT to store the serial number, the mac address and the host name of a machine. This is used when deploying a workstation so the sys admins don’t have to fill in the computer name during deployment. One of the sys admins asked me if we could automate the action of putting the data in the MDT database so when a new machine is deployed it  registers in the database without interaction.

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