I started out the task flying pretty high. I worked on a deployment for some new HP laptops and Windows 7 Pro x64 and things were working out as planned.

Once I got it to where I could PXE boot the laptop, connect to the deployment share and lay the Windows 7 x64 image down on it, I was time to get down to the nitty gritty: Drivers. Applications. Packages. Automation.

Drivers were fairly easy, I’ve been importing them for awhile now, but what I wanted to do was to segregate them into distinct little piles, rather than one motherlovin’ huge pile of inf files and I wanted a computer to only get the drivers it needed for itself, not the whole lot of them.

MDT 2010 provides for this, and there are plenty of good tutorials out there on the net waiting to be found, so I won’t “waste ink” posting it here again. I highly recommend you use the Readability bookmarklet before going to any of the articles on that site, though. They have ads and crap on all 3 sides and a narrow column in the middle with small text for the actual article.

So we got a bare-bones Windows 7 install at this point, with a bunch of Unknown Devices in the Device Manager. Windows 7 is smart enough that most of them have drivers advertised through Windows Update so right-clicking them and selecting “update driver” will find it… but that’s not why we’re using deployment tools, I want it to come out the other end of my process shiny and clean and ready to be used. Following information in those links above and elsewhere, I was able to have WindowsPE detect the make & model of the laptop, and then look that up in my deployment database and download the drivers I specified. Awesome! All but one… one sticky wicket that wouldn’t work because the manufacturer chose to make the driver file a software installation, instead of just a driver. (hate)

On to the Applications settings in MDT 2010 then! Applications don’t work as well as the drivers do. There’s no Selection Profiles for applications like there are for Drivers. Sure you can set MandatoryInstallation <guid> in the customsettings.ini file for the whole deployment share, but then they get installed on every machine that connects, not just the one laptop model that needs this particular driver, so that’s out, too.

Searching around on this topic led me to the Make & Model settings under Advanced Settings>Database. I created a new entry using the Make and Model of the laptop using the data I got from the BIOS. To find out what yours is, drop to a command prompt and type ‘wmic csproduct get vendor’ or get name. Once you’ve created an entry, you can double-click it to open it’s properties and assign things like Applications, Roles and Administrators. Applications is the one we’re looking for here so I clicked on that tab and then clicked Add. I then selected the Driver software.exe that I had set up (as a silent install… another topic!) and then clicked OK. I updated my deployment share and… it didn’t work.

I tried a few different things, I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that I got the Vendor and Name correct, I tried moving the application around within the deployment share, but nothing worked. Because I was working with a physical machine, it took about 30 minutes to test out each iteration. While it was doing that, I opened the ZTIGather.log on my virtual machine that I had deployed to yesterday, which is in C:\Windows\Temp\DeploymentLogs and using the Vendor and Name in there, I created another entry in the database and assigned it a very small application (most of the apps I have in the repository are huge… Autocad, Office, etc.) to try that one out. I updated the deployment share and this time, just in case, I also went into Windows Deployment System and replaced the boot image with this newly generated one.

I booted the VM up, let it PXE boot, selected x64 boot image and stepped through the Wizard and when I got to the Applications screen… Holy smokes it was there! pre-checked! I tried un-checking it and then clicked next, but then went back and it was re-checked, so it was treating it as a mandatory application, but only on that make & model of computer! I then rebooted the laptop into the same x64 boot image to see if it was working for my original problem. If it wasn’t, at least I had proved that it wasn’t an error with my database. I flipped through the screens to Applications and the driver was there and pre-checked! Hooray! hurried through the rest of it and let it deploy. Once it got to the Windows 7 desktop and the last stages of the deployment were running, it installed the driver software. I rebooted (windows update kicked in right away) and when it restarted, I checked out the device manager: Nothing was showing as Unknown Device! Hooray! One machine down, 2 more to go, get a few more apps in there and my MDT 2010 deployment share will be ready to kick out the Win7 Pro x64 jams to all comers! (well, within my company and licensing agreement, anyway)