Have you ever had (or wanted) the need to PXE boot from different Configuration Manager sites? Maybe your test machines are all on the same network and can talk to your ConfigMgr lab site, your ConfigMgr Technical Preview site, or your production ConfigMgr site. Heck, maybe you want to PXE boot from stand alone MDT…
At MMSMOA 2018 in my Hacking the Task Sequence 2018 that I presented with my good friend Andreas Hammarskjöld, one of the demonstrations that I did was to show how to unload a disk filter driver in WinPE without doing a reboot. The number one reason for wanting to do this is to provide a…
Recently, my team has been doing a lot of testing for our next big Windows 10 In-place Upgrade. We are designing and developing a new process that I call Windows as a Service in the Enterprise (and we plan on sharing this at MMSMOA in May). As part of our testing, we need to test…
In Configuration Manager Dynamic Drivers & BIOS Management with Total Control Part 1, I talked about the requirements for the various scenarios when coming up with a solution for driver and BIOS management. I also gave a glimpse of what the Task Sequence steps look like once the solution is in place. In Part 2,…
When approaching any solution, it is a good idea to come up with a list of requirements that the solution needs to be able to meet. This way you will be sure to start off on the right foot and not have to rip and replace, add to, or redo over the solution in the…
At the Midwest Management Summit 2017, I gave a session called Building the Ultimate Windows 10 UEFI Task Sequence. In this session, I covered both types of BIOS to UEFI Task Sequences – Wipe-and-Load and In-place Upgrade. This blog is going to cover the In-place Upgrade version of the BIOS to UEFI Task Sequence. This Task…
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 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…
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…
[Update 4/5/2017] This post was based on the MBR2GPT that was released with the Windows Insider build 15007. There are a few things that have changed since then – the /silent switch has been replaced with the /convert switch. Also, it is highly recommended to run MBR2GPT from WinPE 1703 (this is required for earlier…
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