Deploying Windows 10 to about 250 computers, MDT tweaks?

[burritoincognito]

I'm part of a project that will be wiping and installing Windows 10 on a bunch of computers in the engineering department. We use MDT for deployments, but they're typically in the half-dozen at a time range, not 250 in a weekend.

I've got the image, and I've got enough people and hardware to throw at it and get it done.

However, I'm trying to simplify it down to a couple clicks and IT doesn't need to be there for (they will need to be there to do things like join it to the domain, as I'm not comfortable with leaving domain admin credentials out on the network in plain text). I had a shortcut to the LiteTouch script that looked like it was going to do everything I wanted...until I realized that it was not actually formatting the disk!

We're wanting to wipe out everything, and from the quick look online I've done, it looks like that's only able to be done on a new install, which means PXE booting to older slower servers instead of the much faster SSD SAN array. While I can slap some SSDs in the servers and hope that helps, we have several VLANs, so I'm looking at at least a dozen servers for each VLAN, or a bunch of CD-Rs to boot off of. Probably a mix of both.

Is there a way we can set up MDT to do a wipe if we start it from within Windows that may be newer than the info I'm seeing online (MDT 2010, 2012 info mostly)? Or should I tell the helpdesk to go pull a bunch more old servers out of warehouse?

 

[djoye]

Do you have access to configure MDT and Task Sequences? My MDT experience starts with 2013 Update 2 (and noe 8443) and I may have set something in CustomSettings.ini to format disks by default, but I think it (2013+) just does it by default. Can you look through the task sequence for the Windows 10 OS deployment and see if the "Format and Partition Disk" option is enabled? CustomSettings.ini is in the Scripts folder in the MDT deployment share location; dig around in there to look for settings that might have to do with formatting.

 

[burritoincognito]

yeah, it's enabled, as I've gone through and removed the unnecessary recovery partition it creates.

I'm the one setting this all up, so I have access to everything...I'm just trying to simplify it as much as possible, as these are static one time images, not the flexible ones we normally use. And, PXE and booting from CD will definitely take a while vs clicking on a shortcut.


It just errors out like it's trying to write to something, but Windows Defender is erroring out as being in use.