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Using WDS to deploy SCCM images without the SCCM PSP Integration

By arwidmark / April 15, 2008

This is an articlel on how to use WDS to deploy SCCM images without the SCCM PSP Integration

Background info:
When you add the PSP Role for to SCCM, SCCM will control the WDS, making it hard to coexist with for example other boot images, like the Lite Touch boot image from MDT 2008.
But since you can generate winpe 2.0 boot images in SCCM that will deploy images, wouldn’t be nice if ýou could use it for PXE booting as well?
The answer is, you can, and I will tell you how shortly.

First, some info on the SCCM boot image:
When you boot a SCCM 2007 boot image it will read a few configuration files, the most important ones are tsmbootstrap.ini and variables.dat. They are present in the SCCM CDBoot image, but not inside the actual wim.file. And you cannot the CD Boot image (iso file) to WDS, you need to add the wim-file. The solution is to simply extract the wim-file from the CD Boot Image, add the configuration files to the wim-file, and then upload the wim-file to WDS.

Step-by-step guide for booting SCCM CD boot media using WDS without the PSP Role configured in SCCM

  1. In SCCM, created a CD boot media, D:\ZTI_Install_CD.iso in this example
  2. Extract the D:\ZTI_Install_CD.iso to the D:\ZTI_Install_CD folder
  3. Using Imagex, mount the D:\ZTI_Install_CD\Sources\boot.wim to a folder, D:\Mount in this example 
     
    imagex /mountrw D:\ZTI_Install_CD\Sources\boot.wim 1 d:\mount
     
  4. Copy the D:\ZTI_Install_CD\SMS\DATA folder to D:\Mount\SMS
  5. Using Imagex, unmount the image and commit the changes. 
     
    imagex /unmount /commit D:\Mount
     
     
  6. Add the D:\ZTI_Install_CD\Sources\boot.wim as boot image to the WDS Server

Tip! Setting EnableDebugShell=true in tsbootshell.ini (living in \sms\bin\i386) will give you a command prompt by pressing F8, this the same as selecting the “Enable Command support” on the boot image properties in the SCCM 2007 Console.

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arwidmark