[mdt] Deployment/Winter is Comming - Game of Tablets 64 or 32 or...

[SYNACK]

Ah, the joys of vendors and their quaint ideas of market separation and device specialisation. This is the tale of Modern quad core atom Laplets (Hybrid tablets and laptops) and their use of not only the low power CPU but also of the 32bit only UEFI.

 

This fun game manifests in not being able to use 64bit OSs solely because of the vendors choice of junk UEFI, couple that with thei lack of UEFI support for USB NIC and PXE booting and you have a tidy excrement storm. (at this Point I'd like to thank ASUS personally for their contribution with the Transformerbook T100)

 

 

Now, As it happens there are USB3 Gigabit NICs that work great on the USB ports of these tablets - if not supported in the lacklustre UEFI - and MDT offers LightTouch where you can connect to the share and run lightouch.vbs and set it on its way. This all seems to go fine till the reboot where it spits the dummy as it is trying to use the 64bit Win PE image.

 

What now you say, this 32bit machine is getting the 64bit image, but why? As it happens MDT at least eh one I have just checks the CPU architecture in WMI so sees 64bit, it fails to see the crippled UEFI by companies like ASUS that refuse to fix it so uses not only 64bit PE images but also 64bit EFI boot files.

 

 

All is not lost, my plan is to edit the Architecture identification to check for:

dim rubbishSystemDesign

=true which will set the architecture to 32bit if one of these devices is detected. I hope that this will allow me to image them successfully, if not easily and I truly hope that vendors making these pull their heads out and start supporting stuff like PXE if they want their market to truly explode. Other than this rubbish, these devices are epic and can do anything (if at a limited speed) and are perfect for schools wanting to fully use technology. Unfortunately, as usual they are held back by one or two stupid OEM decisions which is the only reason why the Surface Line exists in the first place.

 

I will post back in a few days when I am back in that school and have tried re-writing MDT around this nonsence.

[3s-gtech]

It's irritating. My results with the HP Pavillion x2 have proven more positive though - they use a slightly more powerful Bay Trail SoC but have 4GB of RAM. The UEFI is 64 bit - they come with 64 bit Windows 8 and will take Enterprise fine. They also show proper PXE options in the BIOS, I haven't tried an adaptor yet though. Bit bigger than T100, but still very good value IMO.

[SYNACK]

It's irritating. My results with the HP Pavillion x2 have proven more positive though - they use a slightly more powerful Bay Trail SoC but have 4GB of RAM. The UEFI is 64 bit - they come with 64 bit Windows 8 and will take Enterprise fine. They also show proper PXE options in the BIOS, I haven't tried an adaptor yet though. Bit bigger than T100, but still very good value IMO.

 

Good to know, the little T100s take enterprise fine, have imaged them before with a complex and time consuming setup of powered USB hub, USB DVD and USB HDD along with the Windows RE to repair it all. That was six of them though and I am now confronted with 30 of them but it is the only device in the price range. We are also getting a few Acer Switch units which may behave better and despite lower battery capacity and a tiny increase in cost look better. At any rate I am resigned to the fact I need to hack a small bit of the MDT code to get these things fired up. At least ASUS has sorted their bios to boot Windows PE as before it would ONLY boot from a Windows 8 32bit DVD.

[Norphy]

Ah, the joys of vendors and their quaint ideas of market separation and device specialisation. This is the tale of Modern quad core atom Laplets (Hybrid tablets and laptops) and their use of not only the low power CPU but also of the 32bit only UEFI.

 

This fun game manifests in not being able to use 64bit OSs solely because of the vendors choice of junk UEFI,

 

In all fairness, this isn't the vendor's fault. It's Intel's fault. They haven't (or hadn't until fairly recently I think) got sleep and instant wakeup working with 64 bit Windows so therefore they only put out 32 bit UEFIs to get around that problem.

 

But yes, having to have a 32 bit image of Windows for tablets is downright irritating.

Edited August 1, 2014 by Norphy

[SYNACK]

In all fairness, this isn't the vendor's fault. It's Intel's fault. They haven't (or hadn't until fairly recently I think) got sleep and instant wakeup working with 64 bit Windows so therefore they only put out 32 bit UEFIs to get around that problem.

 

Grrr, Check my previous posts about Intel, I am no fan of them and their largely junk software and drivers. I does not surprise me that a screw up of this magnitude would be their fault. Don't get me wrong, I like their CPUs and even chipsets but their software is to die from.

[Norphy]

It's not that unusual, generally speaking a company either makes decent hardware or it makes decent software. It's rare to find one that does both. I can only think of a couple and I think you'd disagree on one of them

[sted]

just did 12 t100t's on wednesday diddnt even try to be clever just shoved win8.1 update x86 on a pen stick (well lots) and ran it as an upgrade to replace win 8 standard but keep nothing. Diddnt even consider x64 even though they should be capable as no drives on asus site. What a boring repatative job tht was

[SYNACK]

just did 12 t100t's on wednesday diddnt even try to be clever just shoved win8.1 update x86 on a pen stick (well lots) and ran it as an upgrade to replace win 8 standard but keep nothing. Diddnt even consider x64 even though they should be capable as no drives on asus site. What a boring repatative job tht was

 

Yea, a basic upgrade is easy, a fat image is not so much, EFI boot is limited to fat32 so only 4GB files, MDT does not seem to provide an easy option to split even though wim files can. It can't boot 64bit at all thanks to the EFI, everything else in the system will handle it but the EFI stops it. Even an emulated blueray via my Zalman VE200 of the MDT point failed as the EFI removes compound devices from the boot options.

 

The last lot I did by booting from a Windows 8.1 DVD/USB, going to command prompt and using a NTFS USB to raw apply a WIM file then used the 8.1 DVD to repair all the boot settings. This worked and saved ages worth of time with Office, updates etc already applied but it was still a massive hassle. I have got very close with litetouch and if I can manage it, it will make the process a massive amount more automated than before.

 

Of course ASUS could solve my problems in one go by sorting their EFI to allow PXE boot and add an option to suppress the reporting of a 64bit architecture in their BIOS lookalike EFI config if they insist on not enabling it for 64bit natively.

Edited August 1, 2014 by SYNACK

[Arthur]

In all fairness, this isn't the vendor's fault. It's Intel's fault. They haven't (or hadn't until fairly recently I think) got sleep and instant wakeup working with 64-bit Windows so therefore they only put out 32 bit UEFIs to get around that problem.

FWIW, Connected Standby does work in 64-bit Windows 8.1 and Intel's latest CPUs now. The other issue was that the Clover Trail-based Atom processors (Atom Z2760 etc.) were 32-bit only.

 

Windows 8.1 x64 Connected Standby Support « AnandTech

 

[DMcCoy]

I'm booting the T100TAs from a 32 bit Win PE image with some custom scripts to apply a gimagex sysprepped image on a second memory stick. It's not ideal but it can be done quickly enough.

 

Pity you don't get the domain join etc, but considering the lack of options without PXE/NIC it could be worse.

[SYNACK]

I'm booting the T100TAs from a 32 bit Win PE image with some custom scripts to apply a gimagex sysprepped image on a second memory stick. It's not ideal but it can be done quickly enough.

 

Pity you don't get the domain join etc, but considering the lack of options without PXE/NIC it could be worse.

 

 

Nice, ASUS have made progress, with the first lot the efi wouldn't even allow windows PE to boot, only a standard W8 dvd untill a couple of firmware upgrades ago even with secure boot off.

[DMcCoy]

Nice, ASUS have made progress, with the first lot the efi wouldn't even allow windows PE to boot, only a standard W8 dvd untill a couple of firmware upgrades ago even with secure boot off.

 

I'm using the 8.1 deployment kit to create the new v5.0 PE, it's a bit of a pain, but at least it works with secure boot etc. I don't get a recovery partition, but only because I didn't fix that part of my diskpart script.

[SYNACK]

As promised reposted Imaging The Atom and other Mysteries - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

The new quad core Atom CPUs are great for 1:1 devices, long battery life, support everything and not too expensive, problem is imaging them. The issue with MDT imaging is that they are detected correctly as 64 bit architecture and so copy 64 bit EFI. This should work fine but most of the vendors have crippled the EFI implementations to only support 32 bit EFI. Some tablets support PXE with a USB NIC like the Acer Aspire Switch 10, others like the ASUS T100 don't. Either way if you are trying to use MDT it will happily fill them with un-bootable EFI code.

 

Turns out that the detection algorythm used by MDT is largely WMI and as such, you can just tweak it to look for the offending processor type and switch to 32 bit instead. After a good hour in the company of notepad I found this:

 

On line 515 of ZTIGather.wsf

 

replace all of case 9 with this

' Compensate for bad EFI on atom units. WMI ProcessorId BFEBFBFF00030678
			Case 9
				If objInstance.Caption = "x64 Family 6 Model 55 Stepping 8" then
					sCapableArchitecture = "X86"
					bSupportsX86 = true
					bSupportsX64 = false
				Else
					sCapableArchitecture = "AMD64 X64 X86"
					bSupportsX86 = true
					bSupportsX64 = true
				End If

 

In our implementation this seems to have worked nicely, hopefully it saves someone else some frustration.

 

Hopefully now it will show in the search engines

[DMcCoy]

And this for anyone who wants to try WIMBoot on them to save space, don't bother. Very unstable.