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…
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…
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…
In BIOS and Secure Boot State Detection Part 1, I talked about the various states a system can be in for the BIOS Mode and Secure Boot state. Having these states defined as OSD variables can be useful in determining what actions need to be performed in order to switch a system to UEFI Native…
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…
With all of the security issues and malware lately, BIOS to UEFI for Windows 10 deployments is becoming a pretty hot topic (unless you have been living under a rock, UEFI is required for a lot of the advanced security functions in Windows 10). In addition, with the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft has introduced…
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…
In this blog post, I am going to show some simple steps that you can add to your Task Sequences to be able to detect, disable, and enable BitLocker status. This can be useful (and necessary) when performing activities like flashing the BIOS, running the new MBR2GPT utility, or upgrading to a newer version of Windows.…
You may have noticed a message under Update status in Settings after installing the March 2017 cumulative update that says “Good news! The Windows 10 Creators Update is on its way. Want to be one of the first to get it?” and a link below that says “Yes, show me how“. This is great for consumer…
Update 2/14/2017: Dell has publicly posted a download link to the 64-bit BIOS Installation Utility (now called Flash64W.exe) and you can find it here: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-client/w/wiki/12237.64-bit-bios-installation-utility Now that the cat is out of the bag that Dell has a 64-bit Flash BIOS Utility, I can finally blog about it. Earlier this week, Warren Byle of Dell…
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