Configuration Manager OSD, Recovery Partitions and MBR2GPT

As I was preparing for my Midwest Management Summit 2017 session, Building the Ultimate Windows 10 UEFI Task Sequence, I did a full end-to-end run of the In-place Upgrade Task Sequence and started running into issues. This led me to discover a couple of issues around Configuration Manager (specifically the Format and Partition Disk step) and Windows 10…

Upgrading the BIOS Part 2

In Upgrading the BIOS Part 1, I gave some very important reasons why you should be proactive about upgrading the BIOS on supported systems in your environment. In this blog, I want to discuss the approach to flashing the BIOS along with some lessor understood caveats as it relates to BitLocker, BIOS passwords and UEFI…

Upgrading the BIOS Part 1

Operating systems and software are not the only thing that needs to be upgraded these days. It is really important that the BIOS firmware gets updated as well. Lately, I have been talking to a lot of IT Pros at conferences and user group meetings and I have discovered that not too many people upgrade or…

User Group Getting Started Guide

I just got back from the best systems management conference called the Midwest Management Summit. The reason this conference is so great (besides all of the awesome technical sessions and information) is because it is built for the community, by the community. In fact, the Microsoft Management Summit actually started out as a User Conference…

How to open CMTrace in WinPE like a boss

If you have ever done OSD, then chances are you have had to open up CMTrace a time or two to look at the smsts.log file. CMTrace displays one of the most annoying pop up boxes of all times and it is usually hiding behind the running task sequence dialog window: “Do you want to make…