Booting off USB

Found a little note in the MSDT help files on booting off USB. I had a couple little gotchas when doing this, and I'll let you know what they are. One of the gotchas is in their instructions so I'll give you my instructions (this wipes your flash drive, just so you know).

1 Open admin cmd prompt.
2 Run "diskpart".
3 Run diskpart command "list disk".
4 Make note of the disk number your flash drive is.
5 Run diskpart command "select disk (drive number)".
6 Run diskpart command "clean".
7 Run diskpart command "create partition primary".
8 Run diskpart command "select partition 1".
9 Run diskpart command "active".
10 Run diskpart command "format fs=fat32".
11 Run diskpart command "assign"
12 Run diskpart command "exit"


Then the instructions tell you to use xcopy to copy the contents of your boot CD to the flash drive. Xcopy would not work for me. I just copied the contents of the CD over to the flash drive and it seems to work just fine.

Remember to disconnect your flash drive before your machine needs to reboot or your sequence will fail.

Custom script move OU failing with 0x8007052E error.

After upgrading and messing around with some new hardware (looking at a NAS for a mobile build server) I started getting errors with the custom OU moving scripts that I have been using for a while. I copied my deployment point over to the NAS I'm looking at and made the changes needed in the bootstrap.ini and applications.xml files. I tried my deployment off the NAS and when it got to the Z-MoveComputer_StagingOU.wsf script it failed with an error code of 0x8007052E (-2 something dec -- sorry didn't write it down). After doing a fair amount of trouble shooting I found out that off the NAS it did not like the following line in the code (probably 2/3 of the way down):

Set objContainer= openDS.OpenDSObject("LDAP://" & strDC & "/" & strStagingOU, strAccounttoJoinWith & "@" & strDomain, strAccountPassword, ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION)

In particular I had to make admin@domain into doman\admin in order for the script to function. If you are seeing this error then see if swapping that helps you. The NAS is not on the domain and our other deployment server is. I don't know why this would need to change on one vs. the other, but I don't make the rules, I just play the game.