[mdt] Deploying Software Via Tasks

[tomscaper]

Hey

 

I am having a little problem deploying software via the task sequences, the software all works individually but together in bundles i get 1618 errors from the msi's which are that another application is running, it seems that some exes i have are still running behind the scenes and before they finish its moves on to next task and errorring out.

Has anyone had similar issues and how they overcame them.

[SYNACK]

Those errors are usually due to the installer marking the need to restart flag and the next one refusing to proceed untill a restart has happened, the MDT way of getting around this is to click the option in the MDT package to trigger a restart after the applcation install at which point it will reboot and keep going. The reboot must be triggered by MDT rather than the application installer otherwise it can loose its place and mess things up. If you investigate a bit you will probably find that it is just a coulple of apps setting the flag so you want to put those at the end of the task list and only trigger a reboot after those specific ones.

 

This reboot issue is one of the reasons I usually go for fat image deployment as much as I can only adding the last unique features with packages like special laptop specific programs (quicklaunch etc.) and push as many of the unique software bits by MSI.

[tomscaper]

I thought that the reboot might be the problem so i set every bit of software to reboot one after an other, some of the exe didnt even finish to install, such as sophos, as it runs 3 msi behind it. I will probably have to extract the msi from each and hopefully that will solve that problem.

[deano]

Could you not create a reference image and deploy that to the workstations instead of deploying software through MDT?

[tomscaper]

I had trouble with the image that had software built into it, so had to go to blank and sw installing after