I a previous post, I detailed how to get the Bitlocker wizard page to appear when deploying Windows 8 pro.
I recently confirmed another case where the wizard does not show up. I became aware of this thread on Technet because another user linked to my previously mentioned blog post.
I was able to confirm after a bit of testing, that when using the Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation media, MDT does not show the Bitlocker wizard page. At this point, I am not sure of the reason for this.
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) >= 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).
The Novell ZCM Adaptive Agent is an example of an application that needs to be installed at deployment time and should not be included in the reference image. In general, MDT Lite Touch handles installing applications at deployment time quite nicely.
The Adaptive agent, however is an example of an install process that does not play nice with MDT. It really is a quite horrible installer. First, lets take a look at the installer and what it does. Continue reading
I’ve been working with MDT 2012 in my test environment, and here are three new features that I really like.
Dirty Environment Cleanup
Some times a deployment fails from some reason, and you just want to restart the process of a bare metal install. In MDT 2010, the task sequence would read the logs written to the hard drive and realize that a deployment was still in progress. At this point, MDT 2010 will halt the process with an error. Pressing F8 and using diskpart to wipe the disk is my usual work around, but it is a bit clumsy for less experienced technicians.
So, a colleague hands me two laptops that are going to be added to our loaner pool. No problem… just add the the computer’s information into the MDT database and image them.
Both machines were taking quite a long time for the wizard to come up, and when it did it was obvious that none of the values from the database were coming down. Both machines were connecting to the deployment share, and had valid IP addresses. I even booted up a Virtual Machine I use for testing and verified that it was connecting to the database properly. So what the heck is up with the two problem machines? Continue reading