Share via

Silently Installing the Elevation PowerToys in MDT

  • Article

In a previous post I shamelessly promoted my Elevation PowerToys for Windows Vista.  I recently was contacted by one of our support engineers about installing these tools.  The customer wanted to install most of them in their Windows Server 2008 reference image build using MDT.  The command shell script that I had provided in the download was meant to be used manually by a person logged on with UAC enabled.  The script would "re-launch" itself elevated and would pause at the end to allow the user to see the results of the commands.  This is obviously not suitable for automated installation.  So I provided the engineer with a modified version that could be used in MDT.

To install the Elevation PowerToys in MDT, extract the Elevation PowerToys from the web download to a folder.  Then extract InstallAllPowerToysSilent.cmd from the attachment for this post and place it in the same folder.  Modify InstallAllPowerToysSilent.cmd to install only the PowerToys that are needed.  Use the MDT Deployment Workbench to import the folder as an Application using InstallAllPowerToysSilent.cmd as the command line and the application folder as the current directory.

If you need to install the Elevation Gadget silently on Vista with the rest of the PowerToys (there is no Sidebar on Windows Server 2008), install the gadget manually on a machine, copy the Elevation.Gadget folder from C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets into the extracted Elevation PowerToys folder before importing with the Workbench.  Change the line set INSTALL_ELEVATION_GADGET=0 to set INSTALL_ELEVATION_GADGET=1 in InstallAllPowerToysSilent.cmd.  The import as an Application as described above.

Disclaimer: The information on this site is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, confers no rights, and is not supported by the authors or Microsoft Corporation. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified in the Terms of Use .

This post was contributed by Michael Murgolo, a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Services - U.S. East Region.

InstallAllPowerToysSilent.zip

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Pete, I just tried this myself and you are correct it does not work as expected.  It does not appear to be any problem with the PowerToy scripts.  If looks like the ShellExecute method of the Shell Scripting Objects it not handling the vArguments parameter correctly on Windows 7.  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb774148(VS.85).aspx) I will ask about this inside Microsoft and see if this a known bug and if not I'll get it bugged. Michael Murgolo

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Pete, Turns out this is caused by a know bug in the Beta.  See my post dated January 21, 2009 for a workaround.  (http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2009/01/21/the-elevation-powertoys-and-windows-7.aspx) Michael Murgolo

  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2009
    Hi Michael, This is off I have a question about the Elevation PowerToys under Windows 7. I have found that the Elevate cmd/vbs will correctly elevate an application but it will not pass a file to it and open it. For example elevate notepad C:windowswin.ini just opens notepad elevated with an untitled doc. Is this a known issue or a new restriction in UAC? Any ideas to get it working?

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    Has anyone tried deploying this via ConfigMgr to Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2? It doesn't seem to work... I'm running in the context of Local System. On Server 2008, the .bat just times out and the tools are not installed. On Server 2008 R2, the .bat returns immediately with exit code 0, but the tools are not installed. If I run the .bat on either platform as Local System interactively via launching "psexec -s -i cmd" as local Administrator, the tools do install! What gives? ;(