John Quirk's Blog

We’ve had some problems over the past couple of weeks with our RTM Windows 7 rollout. Everything was going fine and then the gremlins seem to creep in and suddenly the install of Windows 7 would just hang at the “Completing Installation” phase of the image install. This didn’t appear to be anything to do with MDT as Windows is off on its own at this point.

I eventually realised that I’d made a mess of the driver management in the MDT Workbench. We have been using MDT to build both XP and Windows 7 whilst Windows 7 was in Beta and Release Candidate. We’re now ending our XP deployments, but are keeping the build in the workbench for now for legacy support reasons (and VM builds…). We have a massive Windows XP driver repository which, in truth, we could have managed better. Windows 7 on the other hand is fairly tidy as we need very few drivers at the moment (over 89% of the devices on our network are supported on the Windows 7 RTM media according to our MAP assessments). I’d separated XP and Windows 7 drivers out into separate folders in the workbench:

But this was as far as my separation had got. Quite how I thought MDT was going to sort through all this I’m not sure… Anyway, the point of this post is that we can now use MDT’s new Selection Profiles to manage which drivers are added to which machines in the Task Sequence. There’s a couple of things we have to do…

First, create a folder structure for your drivers such as that above (I also split drivers out by machine model below the OS folder for better management; in large environments this is crucial).

Next Create a selection profile per OS:

Each selection profile allows you to select the driver folder you want to be included

Now in the task sequence for Windows 7 we can force the Apply Drivers task to only reference the “Windows 7 Drivers” selection profile:

Now when the install of the image runs, we only attempt to inject Windows 7 drivers. It speeds up the build process and fixes the hanging issue…