Recently, we piloted Windows 7 to a few lucky users. I had to scrub my knowledge of deploying Windows XP, because Windows 7 is so different. My old approach of just taking a straight up ImageX of the system won’t work anymore. This is because Windows 7 creates a small partition called “System Reserved” that it uses for WinRE and BitLocker. Although Windows 7 can work without this partition, it’s a nice thing to have. The other snafu is the way enumerates drivers. You need to either add all the drivers to your image by running sysprep to put the system into audit mode or call DISM at deployment time to inject only the drivers you need just in time. Windows 7, unlike Windows XP, will not look at any drivers you might have sitting in a folder during the minisetup after sysprep.
Bottom line is you are going to want to use MDT 2010 to make your life deploying Windows 7 easier, because it has lots of code to call DISM on its own. The guide I used to build my own MDT 2010 environment is from Johan Arwidmark from here: http://www.truesec.com/deploymentcd. Just register to download the CD and enjoy MDT 2010 bliss (don’t worry, it’s free and Johan is wonderful in his demonstrations)! Another good one is this one from Aidan Finn.
With Windows 7, it was also time to move to using VMs to create images. Why? Well, it’s faster for one. I can take a snapshot and “snap back” if I make a mistake and I get around the 3 sysprep limit for Windows 7. Before you run sysprep, just take a snapshot and viola, you can sysprep forever since the image remains in a virgin state! (Does not really apply anymore if you have KMS up and running, but it does if you are just using MAKs). HyperV comes with Windows Server 2008, so I just used an old Dell Precision 390 box and threw in some extra memory. My XP image came through just fine in HyperV, but when trying to bring in my Windows 7 image from a physical box using Disk2VHD, I got the dreaded STOP 7B error message. I got around this problem by using a tip from someone on the Microsoft Technet forums by using Citrix’s XenConvert, a free V2V and P2V utility.
HyperV uses something called Integration Services (akin to the VMWare Tools). This is built into Windows 7/2008, but not XP. I recommend removing these tools before sysprepping on XP and capturing the image. While it seemed to work fine on XP x86 without removing the tools before sysprep, the x64 version of XP threw a fit and I had use VGA mode to remove and reinstall the tools before the VM would boot properly.
– Soli Deo Gloria