@george1421
Thank you for the detailed response. I have been messing around in MDT in the past and had it working to the point of installing Windows completely unattended, but it had a few issues I couldn’t seem to solve:

• It would install with the Administrator account activated. Through the unattend.xml I was able to figure out how to have it make a second user with administrator priviledges, but I couldn’t seem to solve how to not have the administrator account active and only the user.
• I presume due to limited knowledge, I couldn’t figure out how to let MDT install both updates and applications correctly.

I was wondering if I was able to manually configure a VM and pull an image to FOG that way?
I was able to do this once but bumped into a few issues:

• Hostname was identical to the original machine (Although I think, unless wrongly configured, the hostname changer in FOG was active).
• I remember that in the past you were supposed to sysprep a machine to deal with SID’s and what not, but I haven’t been able to succesfully sysprep a machine since Windows 11 came out. Is sysprepping necessary for what I am trying to achieve? How does FOG deal with Windows SID’s and the likes?

And last but not least, are there any “newbie-friendly” guides that could help me through the entire process? Preparation time is not an issue, as long as in the end, I can quickly image new computers to be ready-to-use for our clients without needing to interact with the process

Thanks!

Hey there,

I’m relatively new to FOG Project and from what I read it could be an interesting addition to the firm I work with. We’re basically an IT service provider, but also supply products and equipment to our clients. Many of those are laptops or desktop computers.
After having manually prepared these systems for over a year now, I figured it was time to invest some time into automating it, but I’ve been struggling a ton.

The most common OS we’re installing currently is Windows 11. We often reinstall new laptops to get rid of bloatware as well as provide a ready-to-go system for our clients by installing basic software.

The way it’s currently being done is:

• RUFUS formatted USB Drive with Windows 11 22H2 (this allowed us to skip some of the OOBE steps when installing)

• Custom Batch script that adjusts some settings, installs software using Chocolatey and searched for Windows updates and installs them.

A lot of these still require a little bit of user interaction and I’d like to bring that down to zero.
But the combination of limited experience with deployment and scripting might be hindering me.

My goal: Unbox a laptop, plug in the ethernet cable and boot from network. From there, it will automatically install Windows 11, automatically create a user account, automatically install our basic set of software and install the latest updates for Windows (or at least the first batch).
Sidenote: I am aware that it would be best if we had a golden image, considering we work with different models and both laptops and desktops. Drivers are generally not a big issue due to Windows updates and in the rare case that we do need extras, it’s fine if that has to happen manually.

I would appreciate if someone was able to give me a bit of a guiding hand in setting this up in a detailed manner. I am hoping to document everything for future reference aswell.

Thanks in advance!