YPCC

Have you put all the drivers into the same package? Better practice is to split driver packages by OS and Revision. Example my client has Dell Laptop "A". DellA has various drivers. One batch of drivers were released in 2015 (lets call those v1.0), then 1 year later another batch (v2.0) was released for the same model. If you put them all into a single package how will you differentiate between old and new drivers? Get my point? Separate packages give you better control about how they are installed. Same goes for Operating system. Id DellA has windows 7 drivers and windows 10 drivers, how do you differentiate? Youre then at the mercy of sccm and hoping it choose the correct driver. A better approach is split your driver packages by OS so when you add them into your task sequence, you can specify in the query to install if Model is like DellA and OS is like Windows 7. Hopefully that makes sense

The other thing i have thought of but not tested is the deletion of c:\windows\softwaredistribution once the first batch have of updates have installed. Not a great way, but anything to force the task sequence to forcibly check for updates rather than relying on cached info.

As well as the multiple "software update" steps, have you added steps to actually force a scan for new updates? Long story short, sccm scans for new updates and caches a list of required updates, those updates are installed, when you check for updates again it uses the cache to determine if anymore are required. What you need to do is flush out the cache and force sscm to rescan for updates again. This is done by adding the WMIC command that triggers a update scan. http://www.toolzz.com/?p=1059 Add this a few times, thatll ensure practically all updates get installed. Flakey but works! Microsoft do need to up their game on this feature. Really lacking.

Yes. Although machine will be in a pending reboot state (it wont get rebooted though).

^ fully agree with the above. This is where some pushback on managements demands is neccessary.

The sure fire way is just to edit the file associations in the registry. Win10 is probably forcing edge to associate itself with pdf. You just need to change that. Bear in mind, if the reg entry resides under HKCU you will need to load and modify the defult user registry during the task sequence. Quite simple. Also check edge to make sure there are no setting in it that are making it the default pdf viewer

We do this at my clients site. Contact the vendor for more information as each one may have a different method. How it works is you create a regular task sequence, then make prestaged media using that. Once the vendor has it they apply it to all the hardware and ship it out. When you recieve the hardware you connect a network cable (so it can seesccm and also join domain etc) and let it run. All the content is on the harderive already so no pxe/usb media required. Best bit is from within sccm you can then edit the task sequence. So for example you can add a new driver package. Then what will happen is the prestaged machine will startup, conect to sccm and see there is a driver package available and download it. So this way it uses a mixture of packages on the hard drive but also downloads newer packages as and when needed. This avoids the need of having to constantly send your prestage image to the vendor. The only time you need to send your vendor a updated prestage image is if you want to up the .Wim itself. Other than that it is very modular.

Why not break down the deployment rather than do all usets in one go. Identify the hisk risk users and leave them out for now. Send out a install-required deployment to all other users are around 4pm. Depeneding on your computer restart policy (administration > client settings), the user will have X hours after 4pm to reboot after which they are forced. So for example if your computer restart policy is set to 3 hours lets say. You deploy at 4pm as required, once installed the user has 3 hours to reboot. Depending on what time they finish work most will shutdown their computer when they leave. Or deploy at 9am and that way the forced reboot occurs at 12noon and users have plenty of time to save their work and restart. This is a security issue so your users and their managers should understand you need to force a reboot.

You are spot on with a powerscript. Create it as a application. Essentially you want to run multiple lines of code in a single command. Possible but a powershell script that installs the msi and edits shortcuts is the best option.

As stated above, try the adobe customisation tool first. If that doesnt work the solution lies in the method sccm uses to image a machine. Sccm uses the "system" account and not a user acclunt during osd. Therefore, any "user level" configuration done by adobe when installing via osd are lost. Theres a trick to this, and that is by editing the default user registry which ensure anyone who uses that machines get the customisation, in your case that would be having adobe as the default pdf reader

C:\windows\windowsupdate.log Or press F8 (if you have coomand prompt enabled), run tasklist to see all running processes, you might see the filename there. The filename might have the kb number in it. Or power off the machine, start it up and go into windows. Control panel > windows update > view installed updates. Any that have failed? Those might be the suspect ones

I too found the software update route unreliable. My solution was the task sequence. Download all the ie11 pre reqs (theres about 7 or 8 KBs). Be sure to obtain the x86 and x64 versions depending on your clients. Then download the IE11 offline installer (google it) Create a task sequence to install the KBs (continue on error), restart then install IE.

This should be extremely simple but microsoft being microsoft have made it awfully difficult. If you dont have the product version being inventoried there is another way Create a configuration item that checks for c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe that is version 11.0 or greater. This path works for both x86 and x64 machines. Deploy this config item out as a config baseline and soon enough you will knkw who has ie11

Typo!! Its dpinst not drvinst. http://blogs.technet.com/b/svengruenitz/archive/2008/07/02/driver-installation-and-updating-made-easy-dpinst-exe.aspx That should get you started.

I see. So this is where it gets a bit tedious. Try this: Obtain a file called dpinst.exe (x64 version if your clients are x64). Download the Windows 10 drivers for your hardware and extract any zip or exe files to obtain the inf's and supporting files. You need to then place all your drivers into a single folder (can use multiple but never tried or needed to). Now i dont remember the exact syntax but if you google dpinst xml, youll see examples. Basically in the .xml file you specify the drivers you want to install. In your case you can set the parameter which basically installs all the required drivers. Deploy this as a package. I did something similar when a few of my clients had missing drivers. Works a treat but just a bit more effort required.

Question, has your sccm server got full access over the "system management" container? <![LOG[unable to find lookup MP(s) in Registry, AD, DNS and WINS]LOG]!> Is your MP populated in the system management container in AD?

Try to get the Drivers showing in All Software Updates. Ive never enabled meta data collection for drivers so couldnt tell you how it works. This would be easiest solution. Or... Build a machine as normal using your Taskseq. Then run Windows Update and install the drivers. Then browse to c:\windows\software distribution\. This folder is where WU downloads and stores content. Do you see the drivers there? If so, copy these files and import into sccm as drivers, voila! This would require a little more work as youd need to regularly ensure youve got all the drivers you need. Out of curiousity, why are you missing drivers after imaging? I usually download CAB files which contain all the drivers for a specific model.

Heres a potential workaround, though not a great one. Identify the file(s) you want to be "unreadable". Add a step in your TS that set permissions on this file so it can only be accessed by sccm(system account) for example. Not sure if that would work. Or you could add a step in the TS to delete the file? At least it doesnt get stored on the machine. I guess it would take someone with some reasonable knowledge of sccm to actually find the user/pwd as theyd need to target the correct log file. Tricky one but thankfully in our case our users and support teams have no idea on where to find stuff like this.

Where are your servers/clients located goegraphically? Britain (and much of europe) went 1 hour forward recently. Did it happen around that time? Try a UTC deployment as suggested and see how that goes.

You can specify the site code in the "setup and configure sccm" step of your task sequence. Its something like ccmsetup.exe /q SITECODE:ABC etc. Google it for the correct syntax

Hi Kops Have you looked at the possibility of using a tool called Psappdeploy toolkit? Google it and take a look, its a brillaint script that will achieve what you want in a much more efficient way. It will: Detect if outlook is open, if open it prompts the user that they need to close it (you can set a timer). If outlook is not open it continues to install the msi. Furthermore, as you will be running it "while a user is logged in), it will create the reg keys you need it HKCU for the user who is logged on at the time. NOTE, you need to consider how you will apply reg keys to other users of that same machine. My approach would be: - Use psappdeploy kit to check if outlook is open and install the msi accordingly - create a separate "package" that apllies the reg keys to HKCU. With packagaes you can choose to "run for every user who logs on". This will ensure your reg keys get applied for all users lf a machine.

Yup pretty clear its failing on .NET On that computer browse to c:\windows\temp. You should see a html file and a log file for .net frameworm 4.5.2. Review the .log file to understand why .NET is failing

On your boot image in sccm, right click, properties and enable a option called "command support". Refresh your DP. This option allows you to press F8 during the imaging process. F8 brings up a CMD window which you can use to troubleshoot. Moreover, if a CMD window is open, sccm will not reboot the machine so you load up your image, press F8, wait for the failure then troubleshoot (as machine wont restart)

**Is there a way to clear it for a computer that is needing to be re-imaged after?** That info is usually stored client side in the WMI. Youll need to use wmiexplorer on the target machine to find the class where the deployment information is stored. Once found, you can delete the entry and run a machine policy evaluation that should see the machine as "ive never run this task sequence before so will run it"

You can use desktops too. For some of our remote sites that needed a DP, we requested actual server hardware but got rejected. Decided to stick a Dell PC in there and use that. Not the optimal solution but iof its a small remote site then works perfectly well. You could even look at branch cache for those sites but not really looked into it so not sure if it would give you benefit in your case.