I like to use USB keys to boot the ZTI/OSD process instead of CDs. CDs take much longer to boot, not all my machines have optical drives, and modifying the WinPE OS on the key is easier during the development process.
ZTI uses WindowsPE 2005/2004 as the boot OS. It is a little tricky to get WindowsPE 2005 to boot from a USB device. Fortunately, Rich Burnam at GoCoding.com has written a nice utility called PEtoUSB to do all the complicated work for us.
Here are the steps to follow in order to make your OSD Operating System Image Installation CD boot from a USB key instead.
1. Create a OSD Operating System Image Installation CD using the SMS console.
- It is important to make sure the CD is functional.
2. Download the program PEtoUSB from gocoding.com http://www.gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb
3. Make a folder and call it something like BDD2007ZTICD (or whatever)
4. Move the .ISO file for the OSD Operating System Image Installation CD and PEtoUSB into the folder from step 3.
5. Extract the ISO to a folder located in the folder from step3. If you don’t have a way to extract the files, you can just copy all the files from a CD you burned of the ISO. You burned it to test it right?
6. Top recap, you have a folder, and inside the folder you have PEtoUSB.exe, an ISO of your OSD Image Installation CD and the files extracted from the ISO.
7. Insert a USB key into a port on your computer. The USB key will get formatted so make sure you don’t have any data on there that you need to keep.
8. Run PEtoUSB and create your bootable OSD key.
Select your USB key as the destination drive. Select Enable Disk Format, Quick Format, Force Dismount, Enable LBA. Drive lable and “Don’t rewrite MBR” can be left blank. Click the “…” to browse to your folder that contains the files you extracted from the ISO. Click Start.
9. This USB key can now be used to boot into ZTI/OSD and install an OS.
If you are only going to be installing Windows XP, then you don’t need to do anything else. If you want to install Windows Vista, there are a few more steps to complete.
Windows Vista has a different boot loader than all the Windows NT based systems that went before. When you run an OSD/ZTI install from a USB key, the SMS OSD process messes up the bootloader on the USB Key and doesn’t set the boot loader on the OS drive correctly. We need to run fix these before the machine reboots for the first time.
I have written a small VBScript that will check for the specific condition of an OSD new computer install being run from a removeable disk (a USB key). If the conditions are correct, then the script will set the bootloader on the USB key back to the NT style bootloader and will set the OS volume to the Vista bootloader.
10. Create ZTIFixMBR.wsf using the code attached.
ZTIFixMBR.wsf11. Move this file to your ZTI build folder (EG \\BDDDeploy\ZTI$\VISTAOSDBUILD\)
12. Open your Build in the Deployment Workbench and edit the Task Sequence as follows
a. Create a new task at the Post-Install phase called Repair Boot Volumes
b. Use the command line cscript.exe “%SCRIPTROOT%\ZTIFixMBR.wsf”
c. Move the task to that it runs after “Apply patches” and before “Next Phase” in the Post Install phase
4. You need to make sure the ZTIFixMBR.vbs script is added to your OS package.
a. From the SMS console, open your OS package and edit the program used to deploy the OS.
b. Chose the Post install phase and select the Zero Touch Installation-Postinstall action (you might have named yours something different) and click Add.
c. There should be a long list of files an applications associated with this action. To the list add the ZTIFixMBR.wsf that you moved to \\BDDDeploy\ZTI$\VISTAOSDBUILD” in step 2.
5. Save your changes and update your distribution points.