Server Core walkthrough

[FLeven]

I tested everything with SAC, 2019 Server core, Hyper-V, Proxmox and had no problem, compared to vanilla MDT, the experience wasn't good to be honest, but to finally ditch PXE and offer a HTTP boot over the edge, I might use it anyway.

I struggled for a second to realize, I had to set DeployRoot=http:// to the new web based deploymentshare in bootstrap.ini, maybe I missed it in the documents.

First, I had to customize the Scripts\PSDStart.ps1, to not check for mspaint.exe on the filesystem providers, as this file is not present on server core. This resulted in a missing "script/PSDStart.ps1" in the MININT folder.

# TODO: Need to find a better file for detection of running OS If (Test-Path -Path "$($Drive.Name):\Windows\System32\notepad.exe"){ Start-PSDLogging -Logpath "$($Drive.Name):\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS"

I also tuned the shutdown command to 5 sec. (I don't like the back and forth between, CMD commands and PowerShell!!) and deleted the creation of the recovery partition for EFI and Bios, as ProxMox is not fond of EFI at all (changed with 7.1).

I had to take my time to learn, that the TS entry's for partitioning, are now useless and I had to change the Partition-layout in Script/PSDPartition.ps1 (Maybe delete it from PSD*.xml ?)

After I created a new TS, based on the the PSDServer.xml and a server core OS, the newly created unattend.xml, <FirstLogonCommands> was still referring to the C:\LTIBootstrap.vbs if I choose a server core OS, standard GUI server or Clients OS were already changed to the new PSDStart.ps1 scripts.

After changing it to the new default, the psdstart.ps1 was still not started after WIM install phase,

<FirstLogonCommands> <SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add"> <CommandLine>powershell.exe -noprofile -windowstyle minimized -executionpolicy bypass -file %SystemDrive%\MININT\Scripts\PSDStart.ps1 -start</CommandLine> <Description>Lite Touch new OS</Description> <Order>1</Order> </SynchronousCommand> </FirstLogonCommands>

I also had to delete the "-start part" of the command.

If I kept the restarts to a minimum (1 :D) everything was working fine, if I used more reboots, the TS was not continuing after the second reboot, I worked around it with an old school runonce regkey step to start the PSDStart.ps1 again.

I noticed if I set "SkipSummary" and/or "SkipFinalSummary" in Customsettings.ini to yes, the final reboot/Shutdown will not happen at the end of a TS, but I will have to test this again.

Thanks for the MDT additions and I hope the project will get some final adjustments.