SCCMF12TWICE: Successfully added DaRT to boot image….or did it?

I was recently onsite with a customer where the proposed design document included MDOP DaRT integration into the boot images. This is a great tool to have because it gives the engineer the ability to remotely connect to the machine while within the WinPe environment. This particular customer is undergoing a massive and understaffed windows 10 migration where every bit of efficiency really makes a difference on deployment nights should anything go wrong. There were a few recent design changes for scale-ability at this customers site which included moving to a heavily MDT integrated deployment solution.

First a quick review on installing MDOP DaRT, Enabling Monitoring, and creating the boot image.

Deployment share \\SERVER\D$\DeploymentShare

Ports: 9800 (Event port) 9801 (Data port)

If you are in an environment that is not really using the MDT deployment share you would still open up the MDT toolkit and modify the CustomSettings.INI. This customer is heavily utilizing the MDT Deployment Share with all the settings applied we can access the “Rules” tab and see the setting is automatically applied after we enabled monitoring. The great part about using the deployment share in this scenario is that we can make constant on demand changes and not have to worry about hash mismatch errors like if were working within the MDT toolkit package.

We are now able to make our DaRT integrated boot image from the console on our primary site server. Begin by selecting “Create Boot Image using MDT” Make sure to select the following optional components “MDAC/ADO Support, and DaRTT”

From this point we distributed the enabled the boot image for PXE deployment, added drivers, and attach it to a task sequence. In the screenshot below you will notice we are missing something? We do not have the "DaRT Remote Control" option that we should have.

NOTE: Sometimes when the boot image is “Successfully” created it does not add the “DaRT” tool. I am able to verify this to be a LIE by looking into the PEMananger.LOG located in my temp folder.

C:\Users\%UserName\AppData\Local\Temp\5\PEManager.12520\PEManager.log

When we look at the command that was ran by accessing the “RunCMD.CMD” we see that only the WinPE-MDAD_EN-US.CAB was the only package even attempted to be added.

You can also go further into investigation by opening up DISM GUI and searching for any trace of DaRT on the boot image but you can see DaRT wasn’t even attempted to be installed into the wim.

Manually modify boot image to include Dart functionality by using the script below.

HOW TO FIX IT: Johan Arwidmark has a script available online that I have used to inject the Dart into a newly created WIM. I’m not sure why this is still a problem that hasn’t really been addressed by the product team.

https://deploymentresearch.com/Research/Post/335/PowerShell-script-Creating-a-WinPE-5-0-boot-image-for-ConfigMgr-2012-SP1-CU3

Once we ran the script created by Johan and injected the drivers I was able to start using DaRT tools.

After the USMT toolkit is called and the Gather step starts to run a box on the bottom left will appear on the system being imaged but minimized. This is your indicator to let you know that you can now use DaRT functionality.

From the Monitoring Node in the deployment workbench right click the computer we are trying to troubleshoot > Select Properties > Select DaRT Remote Control

TL;DR

Do not always take the console UI at face value and always verify with log files. There might be some occasions where the console indicates something was done correctly and you need to go old school on it using tried and true methods. If you run into a problem always do a quick search b/c the Deployment Research guys might already have a work-around.