Hi I was hoping someone could give me some advice regarding OS deployment in SCCM. The situation is, we have about 50 remote sites, each with between 10 ad 30 PCs and extremely slow network connections. I need to reimage all of the PCs at these sites from XP to Windows 7 and I have been trying to work out the best way to do this with SCCM. Due to the speed of the network at these remote sites, it looks like the best way is to use bootable USB media containing the OS image. I am able to reimage a client in this way but I am having problems getting USMT to work at all, and also I can't seem to get the SCCM client to automatically uninstall before imaging, and reinstall afterwards when using the USB method. I think part of the problem is that the USB media goes straight into a PE environment, and USMT doesn't seem to work from within PE. Is it possible to get USMT working from the PE environment, and tell it to save files and documents to the USB stick rather than to the network? Also, with a view to avoiding duplicate GUIDs, is it possible to incorporate the removal and reinstallation of the SCCM client while using bootable USB media? One thing somebody did suggest to me, although I do not know if this is even slightly viable, is to set up a laptop as a sort of portable Branch Distribution Point containing the OS image, then take that laptop to each remote site.. (the network speeds within each site are pretty fast, it just falls down if they try to send or receive data from outside the site as they are in rural locations with very slow lines). Anyway, any advice on this would be very much appreciated! Regards Phil

hi, Concerning the USMT problem, by default in SCCM usmt is used based on the network, meaning that your must create a "state migration point" site system in order to make Usmt running properly. If you want to use USMT in an offline mode or for hardlink migration, you can install MDT on your SCCM server, integrate it in SCCM, and next create an "UDI Task sequence wizard". By using this way, USMT is automatically configured for hardlink migration. For more information about UDI deployment, download the mdt help file here. Regards, Régis

you can use USMT offline in Winpe like so > How can I use Offline Mode in Windows PE using USMT 4 Using a scanstate (using offlinewindir in winpe ) Task Sequence in SCCM 2007 SP2 to save the data to the usb drive will require some scripting, but it's possible the State migration point is commonly used for replace scenarios (new hardware) but you can avoid the smp by using hardlinking in refresh scenarios (keep the same hardware) My step by step SCCM Guides I'm on Twitter > ncbrady

Hi Phil, I think the best way (low administration) would be to install a site server at the site. Install the required roles (PXE, SMP, etc.) and allow those sites to PXE boot from their site server. Then if you have your PXE boot and imaging environment setup correctly you could either allow users to re-image their PC’s or higher a work experience or uni student at a cheap price to image the PC’s. If you invest the time in your SCCM environment it will pay off in the long run. You can even put a $$ value on it. Hope it helps. Blair Muller

Thanks guys for all of your advice. After you pointed me in the right direction, I did a ton of research into USMT in offline mode using hard links and this seems to be working nicely now. I really like the idea of setting up site servers, but as we have 53 such sites I'm not sure we would have the budget for all of that extra hardware, and I'm on a bit of a tight schedule for getting all of our machines reimaged. This is definitely something I will be looking at in the future though. So with offline USMT working (bar a few niggles, such as persuading the TS to join machines to the domain, and prompting for a computer name) all I'm left with at the moment is the problem of avoiding duplicate guids. Am I right in assuming that to avoid duplicates it is necessary to uninstall the SCCM client from machines before they are reimaged? If so, then I would imagine that this can't easily be done from within PE, so we would either have to do so manually, or set up a collection and remove the client through an advertisement. Also, does anyone know if the client can be present on the actual OS image, or should be be installed individually on each machine after the OS is deployed? Thanks again Phil