I’ve just wrapped up doing some work with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Beta 2. I was looking for a way to migrate from XP to Windows 7. The process would be something like:
- Capture the user state of the XP machine
- Format the disk
- Deploy Windows 7
- Restore the user state
I kept looking for a difficult answer and it just wasn’t working for me. I was about to give up for the night when I had a peek at the default task for deploying an operating system. After toying around with task sequences for a week I was getting to grips with the basics. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This default task sequence would do everything I wanted and more:
- Driver injection
- Application installation
- Patching
Impressive! I fired up my XP VM and ran the LiteTouch script from the deployment share on the MDT server. It started up the MDT GUI and asked me a few questions. I answered them an sat back. In less than 20 minutes I had a Windows 7 VM that had all of the user data that was previously on the XP VM. Perfecto!
I’m rebuilding the server with MDT 2010 RC now. This continues to be much simpler than I was expecting. I keep looking for hard ways to do things only to find the solution is simple.