Things to do before a Capture

Doing a Capture and creating a new image to deploy to your clients is quite straight forward with Specops Deploy (and also a clean MDT, this is not Specops Deploy specific).

Just install a client, patch it and then do a capture. Though, there is a few extra things I always do before a capture.

Delete these folders if they exist;
C:MININT
C:_SMSTaskSequence
C:SYSPREP
C:WindowsTempDeploymentLogs

That’s to clean up up from the installation, and we don’t need or want those folders to be distributed to all our clients when we apply the image. And the DeploymentLogs folder should really not be there, if you want to use that in a WMI GPO Filtering as described here Post OS installation tasks.

And we have had some random reports where captures were failing which turned out was because of Windows Defender (Windows 7) so now I’m always stopping the Windows Defender (WinDefend) service before doing a capture.

@Echo off
if exist c:MININT rmdir /S /Q c:MININT 
if exist c:SYSPREP rmdir /S /Q c:SYSPREP 
if exist c:_SMSTaskSequence rmdir /s /q C:_SMSTaskSequence
if exist c:WindowsTempDeploymentLogs rmdir /s /q c:WindowsTempDeploymentLogs
net stop WinDefend 

#End of script

Save it as \serversharePre-Capture.bat and run before starting the capture process.

Updated 2012-01-12: Added SYSPREP Folder to cleanup.