End of an era, MDT is no more: https://oofhours.com/2026/01/18/a-complete-history-of-mdt-abridged/.
I have a few stories myself regarding Windows OS deployment over my career.
I started disk imaging using Norton Ghost back in the late-90s where I used it on my home computer.
Fast forward to November 2002 where the hospital I worked at was using MS-DOS boot disks with Norton Ghost to deploy Windows 98/98SE, then eventually Windows 2000. We had specific boot disks for specific models with specific NICs. I changed all that using Bart’s network boot disk from nu2.nu. It’s the blog entry from August 5, 2005, over 20 years ago!
Eventually we switched that over to burned CDs and then to bootable USB flash drives, however, at the time, very few computers booted from USB devices.
On to my next employer where again it was Norton Ghost and specific MS-DOS boot disks for specific models. I changed that over to a custom WinPE solution where you would boot up to a MS-DOS menu to wipe the disk with mbrwiz, partition the disk with a batch file script that ran diskpart commands and then GImageX to apply the WIM image. It worked brillantly for deploying Windows XP and Vista to bare metal.
When Windows 7 came out in 2009, I switched over to using MDT and Johan Arwidmark’s “Total Control” methodology for injecting drivers at boot time and it worked beautifully.
I last touched MDT in 2017 when I left my employer, but I still talked to the staff that worked there and MDT was still very much in use after I left.
Michael Niehaus is coming out with a free/community version of DeployR in 2026 that is supposed to replace the functionality of MDT and I am very excited to see that when it is released!
- Soli Deo Gloria