Epitome

Hi guys, After developing my OSD process for my work and creating all my WIMs, the IT manager decided that it would be better for us to install the SCCM client and cache into a secondary partition in a hidden folder. Reason for this is we use DeepFreeze and the cache/config is getting wiped at thaw time and is causing problems with Windows Updates. I understand why, but it's creating quite a difficulty to implement. After a few hours of investigation I thought I had a solution. In the "Format and Partition Disk" step of the TS I have a 60GB Primary partition (SCCM Partition) created with no drive letter assigned, then the remaining disk space used for OSDisk. I did this because it was assigning C to the SCCM partition and wanted to install the OS to it. I thought if I used a diskpart command utilizing a txt file to assign M (the letter we settled on) to partition 1 of disk 0 (which is what diskpart told me it was) before the "Setup Windows and Configuration Manager" step, there would be an M drive for SCCM to install to, as per the installation properties I set, namely: smscachesize=40960 smscachedir="M:\SCCM\cache" ccminstalldir="M:\SCCM\client" I am getting no failures in the TS, and in fact nothing in the log files shows any failure except the normal ones you'll see regularly. The diskpart step is completing properly according to the smsts.log file. However, for some reason once the system finishes imaging there is no M drive, SCCM isn't installed and as a result none of the UDI-chosen software is installed either. There is no CCM folder anywhere to be found. The partition is visible in Disk Management, but has no drive letter assigned and if I assign it M there is no data in it. I'm really surprised that the step to install the client finishes without error and clearly didn't work. Thing is, I can't get a log file after that point to check because, once again, the SCCM files are nowhere to be found. I know I could do this by completely redoing the WIM I based everything off of, but that would take several days of work, and I'm about to leave on vacation for a week. Below are screencaps of the steps in question and a copy of the simply diskpart.txt file I'm using. Help please! diskpart.txt

I too spent too much time trying to fix a nearly identical problem. I'm running SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 and ran into a 6 hour 'pause' during the "Install Optional Applications" step of my MDT-integrated SCCM OSD TS. It didn't matter which application was in second place on the list, it would pause at it for 6 hours, then finish the TS. I tried many different solutions for similar problems (setting high performance power settings, installing the applications while on a workgroup then joining the domain, etc). My manager agreed to let me call MS directly and their tech had a solution for me almost immediately: Insert a "Restart Computer" command before "Install Optional Applications". In my case it was between that and the previous step "Convert UDI App List". I would've thought a reboot would lose the data required to know which applications to install, but apparently not. So, once again the solution is: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Who woulda thunk it?