My name is Andrew Barnes an IT Professional from the UK and a moderator on the Official Microsoft Scripting Guys forum. Check my vcard here.
My blog is focused around deployment and infrastructure automation. It is designed to help both beginners and experts alike with my guides, walkthoughs, links and videoblogs. Keep watching, follow me on Twitter or Facebook and email me at 
. For MDT support questions, post a new topic in the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit forum.
Scriptimus Prime.
i read a lot of your posts all of them helped me a lot concerning mdt and xp deployment
but i have a small problem i can’t get mdt 2010 U1 to make xp sp3 install East Asian languages support as i am trying to install the arabic Saudi Arabia but no use any help!!? thank you very much for your posts
My post on XP regional settings should help. It’s here. You can use the technet links to discover the region codes for your country.
Andrew,
I do apologize for copying and pasting information from your site and posting it on my site. I have made the changes and re-posted. Again, I do apologize that article was support to be in draft because I was still testing it out in my environment and wanted to make changes before posting.
It is cool to find your blog! Thank you, for you work. I found very much interesting informations about MDT, this is my favorite tool, whit your information a can upgrate my deploy share.Thank you again!
IT man from Russia, Alexander.
Your blog is amazing! Great work and very much appreciated! I haven’t found another site that covers MDT with as much detail and focus as yours. Thank you!
Thank you for all of your posts especially Hydration!
Hi Andrew, In WDS its pretty simple to pre-stage PC’s by populating the netboodguid attribute of a computer object with the UUID or MAC of the PC. What I’d like to achieve is a pre-stage object in AD and use MDT 2012 in WDS 2012 mode for deployment with the result of the newly imaged machine being domain joined with the correct computer name taken from the pre-staged object
I don’t believe there is any way of targeting pre-staged machines apart from using the deployment database.
Hi Andrew,
Since my post I have discovered the MDT web services on Codeplex. There are some great methods in the web service one of which will fetch the computer name from AD based on the UUID of the PC which is read in during the initial gather.
Now I’ve just got to get Multicast working…..
Cheers
Dave
I was hoping to make use of your expertise with custom mdt scripting in helping to troubleshoot a problem I am encountering with a customized task sequence. The original post is located here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/mdt/thread/2291bcba-bb9e-44bf-8eda-c0bbf0f993bf
Thanks!
Answered. And you’re welcome mate.
Hi Andrew
I have set my keyboard settings ets like you post http://scriptimus.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/mdt-2010-regional-settings/ in mdt 2012 using a TS with an unaltered unattend file .but both Windows 7 and 8 are failing to install correctly. I am sure they are both failing because of the unatteded.xml. When its applying the unattended.xml using DISM it can take about 4 minutes which i am sure is too long.
Have you ever has this problem? .
SkipLocaleSelection=YES
UILanguage=en-GB
UserLocale=en-GB
KeyboardLocale=en-GB
SkipTimeZone=YES
TimeZoneName=GMT Standard Time
To test this, try creating a new Task Sequence. This will generate a new unattend.xml. If the same delay happens then it must be something else.
Hey Andrew. Good blog. We currently use SCCM to deploy and we want an automated way to deploy while setting the local admin account password on each machine to something unique. I’m looking for a way to script this in a way that can use a variable like the host name appended to something else for each machine. Like for instance if the host name was TESTPC1, the local admin password would be mypasstestpc1. For a machine named TESTPC2, mypasstestpc2. Something of that sort. Have you heard of any way of doing this?
Sure, you could generate a custom script easily. Remember, the password would need to be changed at the very end as SCCM/MDT will use the admin account to log on.