Chris Nackers Blog

Kicking It Old School – Deploying WinXP using USMT3 with ConfigMgr without using the SMP

The information provided in this post is “as-is”, use at your own risk and please be sure to test appropriately!

This method has been superseded by a much easier method with MDT 2010 Update 1.  Read this post here for the new method.

Mention the SMP to any ConfigMgr OSD guy and he/she will probably give you a dirty look.  The most common frustration is when replacing hardware and doing a replace scenario.  Most of us have no desire to sit down and create hundreds or thousands of computer associations.  We look back to SMS 2003 and think, man that worked slick, why can i just do it like we used to?  Well you can without too much trouble actually. 

For our environment, we wanted to run USMT in a XP to XP scenario just like we used to.  Capture the user data to a network location, then restore from that network location.  If we were doing a hardware refresh, then we would run a pre-capture to the network location, then when the new machine is named the same as the old one, the user data would come back down onto that machine from the network share.  Hence Kicking It Old School.  Modifying a few scripts and some task sequence steps gave us the intended result we wanted.

The components needed for this are:

Modified MDT Toolkit Package, XP Settings Package (cs.ini), and a modified Task Sequence

MDT Toolkit

The first thing we’ll need is a new Toolkit package since we will want to modify a few of the MDT scripts, it’s preferable to just make a new package and then copy in the updated scripts attached to this post, that way you aren’t effecting you toolkit files for all other TS’s in case you wanted to do something different.

I would recommend naming it “MDT 2010 Toolkit Files – USMT3” or something so you know that it’s a modified package for USMT3. 

The scripts modified are ztiuserstate.wsf and ztiutility.wsf.  ZTIUserState.wsf is modified to force USMT3 to always use the network, and ZTIUtility.wsf has some modifications for connection to UNC’s and creating the necessary folders when they don’t exist.  Thanks to Michael Niehaus for the help on that script. 

Put the scripts attached to this post in your \scripts folder and either replace the existing ztiuserstate.wsf and ztiutility.wsf or just rename them to “script.old”.

XP Settings Package

Next we’ll need a settings package for the TS.  We will want to set the following items in customsettings.ini under the [Default] section.  You can modify the Args to what you would like to run.

ScanStateArgs=/v:7 /o /c /uel:30 /targetXP /ui:domain\*
LoadStateArgs=/v:7 /c /uel:30 
USMTMigFiles1=MigApp.xml
USMTMigFiles2=MigUser.xml
USMTMigFiles3=MigSys.xml
USMTMigFiles4=custom.xml (if needed)
USMTConfigFile=Config.xml
USMT3=YES

The other items you’ll want to set via the DB or cs.ini is the UDDir and UDShare properties.  I do this via the DB so it’s set correctly for all the locations.  If you want to do it in your cs.ini via locations, you can do that as well.  Just remember to set the values in some way. 

UDDir=%OSDComputerName%, and UDShare=\\server\share

Task Sequence

Next we’ll need to modify our TS with the steps we want to run.

First we’ll want to delete or disable some steps in the default TS, your choice.

In the State Capture phase, we want to disable the following steps:

In the State Restore Phase, we want to disable the following steps:

Next we’ll want to add a custom run command line step under State Capture:

Use the following command line, and make sure to select your USMT3 package:

“cscript.exe "%SCRIPTROOT%\ZTIUserState.wsf" /capture”

Next, we’ll add a custom run command line step under State Restore:

Use the following command line, and make sure to select your USMT3 package:

“cscript.exe "%SCRIPTROOT%\ZTIUserState.wsf" /restore”

Next, you’ll to make sure your TS is using your modified Toolkit package and Settings package.

Make sure to change all your appropriate “Use Toolkit Package” steps:

That should be all, be sure to test, hopefully you will find that you can capture/restore data from a network location and that your replace scenarios hopefully are a little easier to work with.

-Chris