Windows 10: Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image

Discus and support Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image in Windows 10 Installation and Upgrade to solve the problem; You just type that command. However, make sure that the drive letter at the front of the command is the letter designating the partition where the... Discussion in 'Windows 10 Installation and Upgrade' started by ahelton, Jul 12, 2016.

  1. ahelton Win User

    Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image


    I'm having some problems with this. Whenever I type this command in WinPE it just says "The system cannot find the path specified"

    Also, how long does it typically take to:
    1) Capture an image?
    2) Apply an image?

    I would expect it to take a bit of time since it's a multi-GB process. However, when I captured the image off the reference machine, it only took like 10 seconds. The same things occurred when I applied the image. I am a little concern that maybe something did work correctly and that's why the bcdboot process is failing. Is there a way to check whether or not the image was successfully captured?
     
    ahelton, Jul 19, 2016
    #46
  2. ahelton Win User

    I think I might have found the problem. On my reference computer, the system partition is assigned drive lettter C and the OS partition is E. I would assume that means I likely captured the system partition and not the partition windows is actually installed on...which explains why it didn't take very long to capture or apply. I am going to try this again and see what happens.
     
    ahelton, Jul 19, 2016
    #47
  3. ahelton Win User
    Yes! It worked! I've officially and successfully cloned a computer for the first time ever *Smile Thanks @RBunning for all the help! I guess now that my test phase is done with, I can move forward with setting my reference computer up exactly how I want it and then see about setting up some scripts to automate the process a little. I'll probably be back for questions when I get to that point. Sorry haha *Smile

    Btw, when I redid my image capture of the reference machine it once again told me there was not enough space to capture the image. I double-checked to make sure I had my USB select as the drive to capture the image to and everything was ok there. I ended up just capturing it to my 1 TB HDD instead. That ended up working fine. I haven't checked to see what size my image is, but I'd be really shocked if it's bigger than 32GB (or really 29GB or whatever the amount of free space is on my USB). I didn't have hardly anything installed on my reference computer, so the image file should have been small relatively speaking.

    A few follow up questions:

    1) When you partition a drive, does that effectively treat the drive like it is really multiple drives? For example, I noticed that it was necessary to format each partition when doing this rather than just being able to partition the entire drive all in one fell swoop. I guess that would mean that you could format one partition differently than another? I understand the basics of partitioning, but certainly not some of the nitty gritty details.

    2) In the Dism command to apply the image, what does the /index:1 mean?

    3) Since my reference computer had the C: partition labeled as System and the E: partition as the OS, do I need to follow this same scheme for the rest of my computers that I will be applying the image to? Or is ok to set the system partition as S: and the OS partition as C: ? If found the below quote on the TechNet site and am wondering what exactly it means and why this wasn't apparently an issue for me.

     
    ahelton, Jul 19, 2016
    #48
  4. ahelton Win User

    Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image

    ahelton, Jul 20, 2016
    #49
  5. RBunning Win User
    Great! It's so neat hearing about someone else doing this and encountering the same problem(s). That was one of the first big problems I had- mistakenly capturing the wrong partition. The next one I had was when I automated this all with a script- and I see this ties directly into your one question which I'll address in a moment. I'm glad to hear everything worked.

    1>>Partitioning a drive does not necessarily mean the machine treats each partition as a whole new drive (although that's what Windows makes it look like for organizational purposes). The system and Windows sees a drive as one drive regardless of how many partitions the drive has. This is why in diskpart, when you a partition a drive each partition does not show up as an individual drive (if you type 'list disk' you'll still see the drive as one drive. If you select it and type 'list par', you'll be able to see all of the partitions on the drive). That's how the system and Windows looks at a drive.

    *>>The way to look at is is partitions are parts of one disk that each have generally the same capabilities as a disk. You could even install multiple OS's to one hard disk on different partitions. Windows likely displays the different partitions as what appears to be different disks for organizational purposes.

    2>>.wim images are capable of containing more than one Windows image. The /index: 1 designates which specific Windows image DISM is to apply from the .wim. You can see a list of all the indexes on a given .wim by typing DISM /get-wiminfo /wimfile:imageName.wim. Given you only just created your .wim by capturing a partition with DISM only once, there should be only one image on your .wim (you'd have to use DISM to append multiple images into one .wim).

    *>>Back in the days of Windows 7, an installer's .wim would contain images of all consumer editions of Windows 7 for a given architecture. This is also the case with Windows 10 (as of today), although there are less editions of Windows 10 than there were Windows 7.

    3>> I don't know what's going on in that technet quote, I would have to have a look at the whole article however I generally don't think that it has anything to do with what you're doing (I think this is a different method than what might be getting discussed in that article).

    -You'll find that when you go to image computers with a custom WinPE installer (that is automated with a script), if the machines don't have the partition structure that you 'expected' it to have when you wrote the scripts the custom installer you made *might* not work... the first time you run it. (I see this happening only on the USB stick method). When you image the machines, you might notice that the script finished too early and when the machine reboots- it didn't work. If you get stuck in a situation like this, try and boot back to the WinPE media and it should work the second time around. If it doesn't- you'll need to adjust your scripts.

    **> There's very high odds you might not have any problems with this, so don't stress over it.
     
    RBunning, Jul 20, 2016
    #50
  6. ahelton Win User
    ahelton, Jul 20, 2016
    #51
  7. RBunning Win User
    1>> It depends on where you're capturing to. I have only captured to a network server which took about 30 minutes (I was moving along at about 3 MB/s). To a USB stick, you should get about 15 MB/s, so I'd imagine the capturing would take about a third of what it was the other way.

    2>>Applying my 9 GB image from the hard disk took only ~15 minutes. When applying it directly from my server, it took ~43 minutes (I don't necessarily have the fastest and greatest network setup at home for my personal use).

    Exact times and speeds will depend on your setup
     
    RBunning, Jul 20, 2016
    #52
  8. RBunning Win User

    Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image

    I suppose in certain situations having the exact same partition structure would be necessary, however in this situation I don't think it is given you clean installed Windows. Just allow enough space for Windows on the partition where the image would be laid down.
     
    RBunning, Jul 20, 2016
    #53
  9. ahelton Win User
    Does this mean that you could setup your reference computer a certain way, capture an image and then proceed to add some more software and maybe change some additional settings and capture another image? And then I guess you could theoretically apply the first image to some machines and the second image to other machines? (aka different images could be applied depending upon who the user of that particular machine is going to be?)
     
    ahelton, Jul 24, 2016
    #54
  10. DavidY Win User
    I don't want to interrupt your conversation too much, but I will add a thought.

    If you want to practise deployment, then instead of a physical machine, you could use a Virtual Machine. I use VirtualBox but Hyper-V is probably better if you have the right 'host' version of Windows. It won't activate, and is a bit slower than using physical hardware, but for test purposes it might be easier to have everything on one machine. Plus if you totally kill a virtual machine you can just delete the file and start again!
     
    DavidY, Jul 25, 2016
    #55
  11. ahelton Win User
    Hi David, thanks for the input. That's a very good idea. What do you mean by "right host version of windows"? All my machines are W10 Pro x64.

    I am already over halfway through this process and thus far everything is going smoothly, fortunately. But I'd definitely like to mess around/practice with things even after I have this done, so think I will implement the virtual machine idea per your suggestion. I've never used VMs before; only have read about them, but have been wanting to give them a go for a while now. This sounds like the perfect opportunity to check VMs out. Thanks again.
     
    ahelton, Jul 25, 2016
    #56
  12. RBunning Win User
    Uhh... yes...?

    You can always modify (or 'update') your image by installing new software, updates, etc... on the reference machine then capture that new image and deploy it (the new image could be deployed on select machines). You might want to re-image all the machines maybe once every 1- 3 years or so if you want to- just to give the machines a refresher, make sure everything is up to date, and possibly give all computers a change to be at the same place/ remove crap files that may have accumulated. Whether or not this is ideal is going to depend on what you want to do and your setup.

    >>I don't exactly understand how my quote relates to your question so I might not have answered your question entirely...
     
    RBunning, Jul 25, 2016
    #57
  13. RBunning Win User

    Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image

    The host version of Windows is the edition of Windows installed on the machine that will be emulating the virtual machine. I don't exactly know that you have the physical resources to ideally emulate Windows 10, though. Hyper V is included generally on select 'professional editions of Windows' (Pro, Education, and Enterprise editions). It isn't included on the Home edition of Windows.

    >>I would recommend Virtualbox or VMware player (free for noncommercial- if you want to play around on your own time)- it's good for VM's and is easier for a starter to understand than Hyper-V.
     
    RBunning, Jul 25, 2016
    #58
  14. DavidY Win User
    Yes you need Windows 10 Pro (or Enterprise or Education). It doesn't work in the Win10 Home version for instance.
    I must admit I didn't read the whole thread so apologies if you said that already.

    The bit that's tricky in VirtualBox is getting the VM to access a 'real' USB plugged into the host machine- Hyper-V may be better, but I usually get round it by creating virtual disks on a USB.

    I also just noticed that Microsoft have revamped their deployment help pages (again) to go with the coming '1607' Anniversary Release and the latest pages are helpful and include things like Sample Scripts which I find are good to get ideas from.

    They have been updated in the last week, although I haven't figured out how to get the latest ADK which is required for some of it to work - may need to wait a week or two for that to be released publicly.
    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/win...ng-walkthrough
     
    DavidY, Jul 25, 2016
    #59
  15. ahelton Win User
    Oops. I grabbed the wrong quote! Bah. I'll edit it to clarify my question.

    Basically, I was just thinking in hypothetical terms. Let's say you have 10 computers in need of imaging. 7 of those computers are going to be for mere peons *Smile and thus need to have certain settings and configuration, while the other 3 are for more advance users. The mere peons only need some basic software installation, while the more advanced users require some more robust tools. Could you therefore first create and capture a reference image for the peons, and then edit the reference computer some more and "re-capture" and image that will be used to deploy to the more advanced user computers? Could the initial "mere peon" image be given the parameter /index:1 and the "advanced user" image be given /index:2?

    Does that make sense?
     
    ahelton, Jul 25, 2016
    #60
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Best way to create W10 Pro reference computer and deploy the image

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