Deploying Windows 7 Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts relating to my recent adventures with deploying Windows 7.

With this first post I will introduce the overall environment I'm building with and building for.

There are a few things that are a bit special about this deployment. It’s not your typical corporate domain-joined limited user deal -

• The machines are not domain joined
• There is no 'back-door' management
• The users own the machine. Both fiscally and administratively

The machine owners get much the same experience as they would have buying a laptop at a retail store. They get prompted for all the same options - machine name, enable updates - everything. It's their machine.

All I'm doing is making the installation consistent regardless of the hardware platform (i.e. no crapware) and pre-installing the applications that are required for the owners work.

That said not much of the remaining technical details are affected by this change in Operating System ownership. The same scripts and bits are equally applicable to managed, domain-joined deployments.

The only difference is that I need to make the deployment more resilient. Many of the target machines don't have optical media and it’s still a work tool. It needs to be resilient to any of the bad, bad things that its owner may do to it and get them working again quickly.

To this end I've deployed the image with Windows RE included. WinRE is a recovery environment that is included in Windows Vista and Windows 7. It’s the same environment you boot into when you choose recovery on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 installation DVD. The difference here is that I've baked WinRE and a backup copy of the Windows installation image into the hard drive within a hidden partition.

With Windows RE suitably configured the user can totally mangle the installation of Windows in C:\WINDOWS. They can easily boot into Windows RE and then re-install a clean copy of Windows and all of their applications as they were when they first received their machine.

Before Windows RE does this reinstallation it moved all of the user data in C: into C:\WINDOWS.OLD\ so the user won’t lose any of their documents. Additionally in this particular deployment the user’s data will also be backed up to Live@EDU.

The next few posts in this series will cover off three broad topics-

1. My lab environment including VMware workstation, Windows Deployment Server and the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit
2. Building and capturing an image
3. Deploying an image that includes WindowsRE from Windows PE booted either from USB or WDS.

Stay tuned!