MDT Deployment Share Properties

Tools Required
MDT

Key Terms / Acronyms
MDT Deployment Share - The Deployment Share in MDT (Not the file system or network share)
%InstallDir% - Path to the MDT Installation Directrory.  This is typically C:\Program Files\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
OC's - Optional Components.  Term is used in ADK


Now the fun starts.  Lets take a look at the MDT Deployment Share configuration.  Right click on the MDT Deployment Share and click on Properties

General
In the Platforms Supported section, uncheck the x64 option.  Once we get things going for x86, we will add this back later.  Press [Apply] to save the changes, then click on the Rules tab.  It is important to press [Apply] whenever we make changes as MDT has been known to lockup when the Deployment Share Properties is open.

Rules

This is the CustomSettings.ini that is used by LiteTouch.  We will leave this alone for now.  Press the Windows PE tab.

Windows PE

We are not going to make any changes to this section, but I will explain what everything does.  Most of these settings will be changed later.

• Platform
• There are two options for Platform, x86 and x64.  Since we disabled x64 in the General tab, we do not need to configure any settings for x64, so we will leave this alone
• General > Lite Touch Boot Image Settings
• Generate a Lite Touch Windows PE WIM file
• Obviously we can't change this option, but this is the primary Boot Image used for imaging computers.  The created WIM will be saved to %DeployRoot%\Boot
• Generate a Lite Touch bootable ISO image
• This is enabled by default.  The created ISO will be saved to %DeployRoot%\Boot
• General > Windows PE Customizations
• Custom background bitmap file
• This is selected by default.  We will configure a proper Wallpaper later
• Extra directory to add
• We can create a directory and add some utilities like CMTrace or BGInfo.  That will be covered later so hold off for now
• Scratch space size
• This is defaulted to 32MB.  When WinPE is booted, the boot.wim is uncompressed to X:\.  The drive is a RAM Disk.  Scratch space allows room for log files or temporary files to be written to X:\.  The downside is that we need to make sure that there is enough RAM on the computer to hold the uncompressed WIM and the scratch space (which can be configured to 512MB).  Change this value to 128 and then press [Apply]
• General > Generic Boot Image Settings
• This allows us to create a secondary Boot Image and ISO.  We will be using this later in this Guide

Press the Features tab

• Features > Feature Packs
• Feature Packs are also known as OC's (Optional Components) by ADK, and as Components in some of the XML files.  These Feature Packs when selected, are installed into the Boot.wim to add additional capabilities.  All the Feature Packs are included with ADK, so that is why we needed to install it with MDT.  We are going to heavily customize later in the Guide so we will leave it alone for now.  We should have MDAC checked by default.
• Press the Drivers and Patches tab.

• Drivers and Patches
• Selection Profile - We will customize this after we add some drivers, so we will leave it alone for now.

Let's press [OK] and get out of Properties now.  The next step is to add some drivers.