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Splitting Task Sequences To Make Life Easier #2

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In a previous post, I described the first of two methods on how to drastically reduce the time (and stress/frustration!) it takes to debug an MDT task sequence, by eliminating all the tasks that work.  In this post, I’d like to close this topic with the second of the two methods on how to achieve the same goal hopefully providing you with some good ideas on how to make your deployments easier to work with.

In MDT 2010 there is a little-used task sequence template called “Post OS Installation Task Sequence” which appears in the wizard that opens when you create a new task sequence.  I suspect that the reason that it is little-used is because the name of it is a little ambiguous (although I myself am struggling to come up with a concise and descriptive replacement name right now!).  When you use the New Task Sequence Wizard, you'll notice that there is a template in the list called "Post OS Installation Task Sequence":

 

If you create a new task sequence using this template and then open the task sequence editor, you’ll find that it looks rather like the one in the below screenshot:

 

Look familiar?  Well, it isn’t too dissimilar to the one I blogged about in my previous post!  The idea of this task sequence template is that it contains all the tasks that appear in the State Restore group of a “standard” task sequence, allowing you to run this part of the task sequence as many times as you like, without having to format the disk and reinstall Windows each time; speeding up dramatically your testing and debugging.

 

This post was contributed by Daniel Oxley, a Consultant with Microsoft Services Spain

 

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2015
    I know this post is SUPER old but it's relevant to what I'm trying to do now.

    My question is, do you need to create a standard deployment task template without the state restore portion in order to run before this one? Or does this task somehow revert the machine you're running it on to "pre-state-restore" state? Confused...