MDT 2010: Create a Lite Touch Deployment USB drive

This may have been blogged before but never in stereo! I thought you may want to watch a music video while reading todays blog post.

OK, so I’m a little cheesy today. But hey! it’s not like I’m getting paid for this. Right then. you’ve got yourself a mountain of LTI CD’s because you kept updating your bootstrap.ini? No? Well here’s the solution anyway: Dont boot from CD but use a . . . (wait for it! . . .)
Flash Drive! (Aah-haa! Saviour of the universe!). Only 3 simple steps needed:

The “Host” – Prepare your USB Drive

 {Danger, Wil Robinson! This will wipe your flash drive (disk 1). Do not continue if you are not confident in targeting the correct disk.}

Open an elevated Deployment Tools Command Prompt, type Diskpart and press enter. Within the diskpart console type:

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit

Remember disk 1 may not be your UFD so use List Disk in Diskpart to determine your UFD disk number. This is similar to the Technet article  Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on UFD except you dont need to use size=<size of device> just use the whole drive. Also, it’s best to quick format the drive.

The “Shell” – Generate your Windows PE files

Create the directory structure for building your Windows PE disk. Think of this as the ‘shell’ if you like.  Next, use the copype.cmd batch file to create folder structure based on your required architecture. Or in other words type:

copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86

This will create a folder structure in the root of your c: drive like this:

Copy all the files and folders from the ISO folder to your flash drive.

The “Engine” – Update the WIM file

Copy the LiteTouchPE_x86.wim from your Deployment Share\boot folder
to your {Flash Drive}\Sources folder and rename it to Boot.wim. Think of this as the ‘engine’ or the heart of your UFD.

That’s it. You can now boot to your deployment share and perfom Lite-Touch deployments.