SCCM 1610: Ability to migrate BIOS to UEFI Partitioning and Boot

One of the biggest automated migration issues was always the fact that many companies have Windows 7 x64 in place but due to legacy issues with UEFI deployments in the past they stick still with LEGACY Bios settings and not with modern and much more secure UEFI boot bios settings. UEFI also need GPT partitioning and not MBR partitioning.

To remove this hurdle Microsoft introduced in SCCM 1610 a nice feature that allows you to migrate to UEFI during a task sequence.


Additionally to the task sequence you may need a vendor specific tool that allow you to migrate your bios settings to UEFI.


More you can find here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/osd/deploy-use/task-sequence-steps-to-manage-bios-to-uefi-conversion


Example with Dell CCTK.
The original blog still refer to an older alternate way. But the rest of the article in the end refer to the Dell CCTK tool to modify the BIOS. This is still valid.
http://www.scconfigmgr.com/2016/06/14/switch-from-bios-to-uefi-on-dell-systems-during-windows-10-deployment-with-configmgr/

Enjoy the show!

LEGACY: Good news for Win7 and Win8.1 image builders -> new Win7 "SP2" available aka Convenience rollup update

I had recently a customer they had the need to rebuild the Windows 7 SP1 image from time to time due to changes in their images. It took hours over hours to get the hundreds of post SP1 fixes into the image. And finally the image build process stuck with an error.

This was the log situation with our customer while building a new reference image with SCCM:


The client is busy downloading updates from the Deployment Point and putting it in the Ccmcache folder.
But for some reason, the activity in WUAHandler.log suddenly stops with the following lines:
Successfully completed scan.      WUAHandler     09-Mar-16 14:00:53         3016 (0x0BC8)
Going to search using WSUS update source.         WUAHandler     09-Mar-16 14:02:06         2668 (0x0A6C)
Synchronous searching of all updates started...  WUAHandler     09-Mar-16 14:02:06         2668 (0x0A6C)

Usually, after these lines we would expect lines were it is doing the actual installation of updates which it doesn't.

It seems we are not the only ones dealing with this problem. MS created a new solution for people like us dealing with these types of issues.

They created a so-called "Convenience rollup update for Windows 7 SP1"

You find more informations about this here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsitpro/2016/05/17/simplifying-updates-for-windows-7-and-8-1/

And the corresponding KB article is found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3125574

This Convenience rollup does not include updates that are not broadly available and necessary and also not updates they introduce behaviour changes or hotfixes they need additional changes like registry keys etc. So it will shortcut the whole process dramatically but there are still other updates you need to apply additionally.