Displaying the Bitlocker Wizard Pane with Windows 8 Pro and MDT 2012 Update 1

Using MDT 2012 Update 1 with ADK, I built and captured a Windows 8 Pro image to enable my institution to more easily do some testing with Windows 8. After setting up a task sequence to deploy this reference image I noticed something unexpected. When choosing the Win 8 task sequence, I was not presented with the Bitlocker wizard pane. The wizard pane was showing up fine for my Win 7 task sequences.

I posed the question on the MDT-OSD email list, and Michael Niehaus to the rescue! Turns out there is logic in the MDT scripts to determine if the edition of Windows is a “Premium SKU” to determine what features are available. Since I was using Windows 8 Pro instead of Enterprise it was not getting marked as a premium SKU.

Of course, since Win 8 Pro does support Bitlocker (Win 7 Pro did not), this is a bug. A user posted a bug report to Microsoft along with some work around code. If you have a Connect account, you can see the bug report here.

The work around :

In ZTIUtility.vbs add the following two lines of code after line 3846 :

</p><p></p><p>case "PROFESSIONAL", "PROFESSIONALE", "PROFESSIONALN"</p><p> If Left(oEnvironment.Item("OSCurrentVersion"), 3) &gt;= 6.2 Then IsHighEndSKUEx = True</p><p></p><p>

Update 1-14-2014 :

Hat tip to this Post on MDT2012.com. This bug still exists in MDT 2013 and Windows 8.1 has been released since the writing of this post. The above lines of code have been changed to allow for Windows 8.1 (changed from equal to greater than or equal).

7 thoughts on “Displaying the Bitlocker Wizard Pane with Windows 8 Pro and MDT 2012 Update 1

  1. Hi Vaughn,

    I have a question for you 🙂
    I’ve added those lines in the ZTIUtility.vbs file but now when i try to deploy my Windows 8 Pro i have a pop up :

    A VBScript Runtime Error has Occured
    Error: 13 = Type Mismatch
    VBScript Code :
    —————————–
    Left(Property(“ImageBuild”), 1) = “6” and oUtility.IsHighEndSKUEx(oEnvironment.Item(“ImageFlags”))

    My others TS still work. This window only appears when i try to deploy my TS Windows 8 Pro. (By the way before adding those lines in ZTIUtility.vbs my TS wasn’t bugged).
    Do you already had this error? Or do you have an idea on how to solve this error?

    Thanks in advance,
    Chris.

  2. Hi Chris, thanks for stopping by. I have not had that error, not entirely sure what could cause it. Two thoughts of possible causes :

    – A typo in your modification of ZTIUtility so that it is expecting something other than a string when it gets to your modified Case statement…

    – Perhaps for some reason for your Win 8 image oEnvironment.Item(“ImageFlags”)) is returning something unexpected. I’m not sure what would cause this though.

    • Well… Finally i came back on a Windows 8 Enterprise and it works like a charm!
      I did not found why i had this bug with Windows 8 Pro…
      Anyway, thanks for your answer 🙂

  3. Thanks for workaround to get Bitlocker activated on Windows 8 Pro. I struggled a lot before finding your post…

    As Chris, I got the type mismatch error. It is caused by the fact that 6.2 should be quoted (“6.2”). For some reasons, the unquoted 6.2 works for the bitlocker wizard activation but cause a type mismatch error in ZTIBDE.vbs.

    Michel

  4. I reported this on the connect site in your original link but now all the bug reports are closed. They still haven’t fixed this with MDT 2013. I updated my original logic to support 8 and 8.1.

    Case “PROFESSIONAL”, “PROFESSIONALE”, “PROFESSIONALN”
    If UCASE(oEnvironment.Item(“OSCurrentVersion”)) >= “6.2” Then IsHighEndSKUEx = True

  5. I am running SCCM 2012 R2 Sp1 with mdt 2013 update 1 (8298) deploying Windows 10 Professional. Running the UDI I got the mismatch 13 problem causing bitlocker not to enable. The problem occurred when I set the OS language to Norwegian or French. I tested English, Italian and Japanese with no problems. The problems was the following line:
    If Left(oEnvironment.Item(“OSCurrentVersion”), 3) >= 6.2 Then
    I removed the line and the mismatch error was gone and bitlocker worked on all languages.
    Instead of commenting out the line in ztiutillity.wsf it may work to comment out the lines in the script that actually throws the missmatch 13 error ztibde.wsf:
    ‘ElseIf not oUtility.IsHighEndSKU then
    ‘ oLogging.CreateEntry “Bitlocker is only supported on Windows Enterprise or Windows Ultimate or ‘Windows Server”, LogTypeInfo
    ‘ Main = iRetVal
    ‘ Exit Function
    ‘ Else

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