Mind Circus

So, somewhere along the way, I’ve managed to lose some posts that were uploaded over the last 6 months. In fact, I’ve lost almost all changes to the site over the last 6 months. How frustrating. If anyone happens to miraculously have copies of my posts, I’d be eternally grateful for the content!

Hope everyone’s keeping well

Phil

Came across this the other day and didn’t see anything come up in a Google search so figured I’d blog it.

If you’ve recently added Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) to your MDT deployment, and you’re getting an offlineServicing error when deploying an OS, you may want to check this out.

The problem seems to occur when:

• You’re running Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010
• You’re deploying Windows 7 with SP1 integrated
• You’ve added IE9 in .cab format to the deployment via Packages
• When deploying an OS, you get a fatal error saying: “Windows could not apply unattend settings during pass [offlineServicing]“

To fix the problem, I removed the IE9 .cab from Packages and instead, integrated it into the install.wim image, using these instructions: Windows 7 – Add or Remove Packages Offline

I will attempt to write up proper instructions when I can, but the above link should provide you with enough information to work it out

If you’re deploying Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 with a MAK key, and you want to avoid the user seeing the Microsoft Office Activation Wizard when they first start up an Office application, follow these instructions:

1. Run the Office 2010 Customization Tool (OCT)
2. Open up your customised MSP file
3. Go to: Setup > Add installations and run programs > Add…
4. Then enter the information as seen in the image below.
   1. Target: [SystemFolder]\cscript.exe
   2. Arguments: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act
      
5. Don’t forget to save your MSP!

This will activate Office immediately after it is installed, so that it won’t pop up the Activation Wizard when the user first runs Office. Think of this as either a kind of pre-activation or post-activation of Office 2010.

This guide makes the following assumptions:

1. You know how to load OCT (Office Customization Toolkit)
2. You are deploying 32-bit Office onto 64-bit Windows
3. You deploy Office 2010 at Deployment time using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (although, for this to work, you don’t have to).
4. You deploy Office 2010 using a MAK key.
5. You store your MSP file in the \Updates\ within the Office 2010 installation files on the MDT share (again, for this to work, you don’t have to).

I found this info after hopelessly searching around, finally coming across this page on Microsoft Technet.

Can’t find the Customisation Wizard for Adobe Reader 10?

You’ll find it here: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/10.x/10.0.0/misc/

Share and enjoy

Yet another “not entirely obvious” VMware thing

If you want to use the VMware vCenter Converter from within the vSphere Client you need to:

1. Install vCenter Converter on the vSphere vCenter Server (It’s an option on the vSphere vCenter installer)
   
2. Now log onto your vSphere Client and go to:
   1. Plugins > Manage Plugins > Install vCenter Converter Client
3. Once installed, right click on any ESX host, or ESX Cluster and choose “Import Machine…” from the bottom of the context menu.
   
4. That’s it. The vCenter Converter wizard will then pop up

Note: This is tested and working on VMware vSphere 4.1. Let us know how you get on with other versions of vSphere!