Need assistance with Windows Deployment Services and MDT

[kagarium]

I apologize in advance for the wall of text in front of you.

 

 

So, I've spent the last few weeks configuring and testing Windows Deployment Services and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit on an install of Server 2012 R2. This is used to image computers that we give out as donations to students at our college through a raffle.

 

I have a laundry list of issues that have been popping up here and there. I have solved a good number of them with some lucky guessing and a lot of them with good old google.com. I've still got a few that I could really use a hand with however;

 

 

• Application Installation

We install Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, Google Chrome, MalwareBytes, Mozilla Firefox, and LibreOffice on all computers.

 

So far, Chrome, MalwareBytes, and Firefox install silently without a hitch.

 

Adobe Reader installs, but the end screen still appears requiring me to click 'finish'. Ive tried /silent, /passive, and /sAll as suggested in an adobe forum question, and none have worked. Deployment continues fine after clicking finish

 

LibreOffice refuses to install. /silent and /passive do not work. It will not even open the installer, it just says 'failed, returned with error code 2 or something similar. Cannot remember exactly.

 

 

• Driver Installation

Most of the computers we give out are supplied to us by the college. All the same model (HP Compaq DC7900). Windows gets all of the drivers installed itself except for the audio driver. Even going into device manager and forcing it to look for a driver, it wont install one. So we use the Windows 7 driver off of HP's website. Works just fine.

 

So how can i add this driver into the deployment task sequence? I assume its more than just throwing the .exe in a folder.

 

 

• Skip Deployment Settings

I would like MDT to skip certain items during the pre-deployment process. For example, we never enable bitlocker, so it would be nice to just never have to see that screen and have it always set to "do not enable bit locker by default. Another good example would be region settings. They are always going to be English, and Eastern Standard Time. I would like to just be able to skip these screens and have it set to the defaults i want.

 

 

• Skip domain login

Everytime we image a computer, it asks for a domain login (username, password, domain). Can i set it up so it will automatically login with a certain account and skip the dialogue? Or just a way to skip the dialogue entirely?

 

 

• Windows Update

Rather than constantly updating my boot image, I would like Windows to get some updates during the deployment. I see 2 disabled tasks in the task sequence.

 

Windows Update (Pre-Application Installation) and Windows Update (Post-Application Installation)

 

Is one of these preferable? Is there any issue/disadvantage to just enabling them both (They are disabled by default)

 

 

• Changing default programs

I have no idea how i would go about this through deployment, but i would like chrome to be set as the default browser, pinned to the taskbar, and edge removed from the taskbar. I would also like adobe reader to be set as the default pdf viewer instead of edge/chrome.

 

 

• Disabling built-in administrator

We create a generic account on the computers named "User" with administrator privileges and no password. I currently run two scripts in the custom tasks in my task sequence to do so

 

AddUser.cmd

@echo off

net user User /add
net localgroup Administrators User /add

 

AdminDisable.cmd

@echo off

net user administrator /active:no

These run at the end of deployment. After the deployment finishes we manually reboot the computer and the administrator account disappears. It works, and I don't mind it being what we need. But if there are any other ways I could do this I'm open to them

 

 

These are my main issues as of now. Any and all help would be super amazing!

 

 

Thanks,

 

Ken

Edited February 3, 2018 by kagarium