Migrating an Operating System is a major project that requires careful planning and guidance. To ease the process, Microsoft has provided a number of tools for automating Vista deployments including the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 (MDT), Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and the new User State Migration Tool.
There are many guides available on the internet, but we felt they all miss some steps. Therefore we decided to share our internal documentation. The process for our deployment scenario includes:
- Prepare an USB stick with “Windows PE Boot Disk”
- Prepare and capture an image (ImageX)
- Manually deploy an image on a single machine (ImageX)
This document does not cover automated deployment of images on multiple computers using tools as ADS.