Great idea, poor execution. I still haven't been able to deploy a custom image using it. I've fought with scripts, the Task Sequencer, Group Policy Preferences, and I still haven't been able to deploy my custom image with all my customizations. I'm still flying blind with no guidance in using any of these, so it's been a comedy of hit and miss, mostly miss.

This issue has set me back almost 2 months and there isn't any resolution in sight. It's getting to be worth the money to pay Symantec for the Ghost Solution Suite, just to eliminate the headaches and get this thing deployed. At least I can get multicasting zero touch deployment through the Ghost console.

Still think it's really poor idea to get people to capture a custom image with ImageX, and not have it as an option to deploy the image. I guess my rant is aimed mostly at the documentation team. A handy guide on using the Task sequencer would have been a great help, but since there isn't any documentation concerning it, I'm screwed.

If I could have the option of deploying a totally customized image file through MDT 2008, I'd use it and sing its praises. As it is, messing around with scripts, the Task Sequencer and Group Policy Preferences with no documentation has been nothing but an exercise in frustration.

Is there ANY documentation on customizing images through the Task Sequencer?

Apparently not, and THAT is why I hate MDT 2008 with the burning intensity of 10,000 supernovas!

What are you looking to customize?  The task sequence and MDT as a whole are NOT a end all be all of configuration.  They are a tool.  I use the MDT to automate a lot of steps that I typically had been doing by hand.  Basically put, if you want to customize something after the fact, you need to use registry merges, vbscript, and scripted installs to accomplish this.  I find this infinitely more helpful than setting the same settings in the base image because of the flexibility it allows.  For instance, if you setup a setting that points to a server, what do you do when that server retires?  Do you REALLY want to rebuild all of your base images again?  Why not just pop out your old reg/vbscript/installer, tweak it, and place it back?  I can switch all of our settings very quickly.

I guess you should think about it like this, the task sequencer is just the glue between all of the steps that YOU need to automate.  If you have anything in particular that you want to set and you can't figure out how, search google, ask us, or check out the plethora of repositories of knowledge about such things.  I've personally found that there are VERY few options in Windows that can't be tweaked via scripting, and if you throw in a tool such as AutoHotKey, anything and everything is available to you.

Are you sure you added the custom wim file as the source for your new task sequence?  It almost sounds like your not using the custom image, but instead using the Vista source files.  You can check the image your sequence is pointing to under the "Install" folder in the task sequence.  It should say something like "Install Operating System" and "VISTA Image under Vista\Vista.wim"

Did you make the custom wim file manually, or did you use MDT to make it?

I would describe it as following, for people that don't know where to start BDD and MDT can be a great start and you might get some quck results in doing basic things, but for people that have been creating and managing builds for years, BDD and MDT sometimes do just a bit too much behind the scenes, where as others have mentioned, you spend an awfull lot of time in finding out where and what it does.

Going forward, I will love to see that Microsoft allows adding some scalability on how much influence the workbench takes, e.g. if i have created my custom image , i just want to drop it into a deployment location and not spend any more time in tweaking things again.

Jardon, i don't know what your level of experience is, but i would like to encourage you in saying you're not the only one that is spending hours, but see it from a positive side, the more time you spend on this type of issues, the better you get to learn the tooling inside out by going step by step through the scripts, i'm sure during that journey you find some interesting topics that might be of use at a later point in time.

Best Regards

Alex

I guess I'm a little confused with your issue with capturing the image with ImageX.  Are you not able to import the custom WIM into the MDT deployment workbench?  Or you can, but you are unable to deploy the Image? 

Rich

Did you successfully abandom MDT and revert to Ghost tools?

I'm new to imaging, have tried to use MDT for 2 months... still no final image.

If you have encountered some documentation which explains the whole imaging process and how the tools fit together, I'd love to read it..

Maybe MDT is for people who have done imaging for years and know exactly what they're doing... and just need a high-level toolset to save time.

Thanks, Paul