Win 10 Fall Creator's Update in place upgrade on ref image?

[barry.weiss@moore.org]

Hi there,

Can I do an in-place upgrade from 1703 to the Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update (1709) on my reference VM (Hyper-V) and then deploy that to clients?  Or, do I have to start from scratch with 1709 and create a new reference VM with 1709 as the base image?

Thanks,

Barry

[Jeff Harris]

The recommendation is to avoid in-place upgrades, especially when upgrading between Windows 8 and Windows 10. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that an update to 1709 is going to break anything. It may increase the overall size of the image, but it should work as intended.

You can always make a backup of your reference VM and perform a test capture/deployment. Remember; if you want to use VM snapshots in this case; you'll need to do a warm capture bybooting the reference VM to the SmartDeploy ISO. 

[lphooper03]

When I went from the original Windows 10 build to the Creators Update in my image, SysPrep would not complete successfully on the newly imaged SmartDeploy machine. SmartDeploy was useless at this point. I had to go to Microsoft Volume License and download the most up-to-date .iso of Windows 10, including the Creators Update. I recreated my image using this install media, burned SmartDeploy to USB and everything worked fine. 

Moral of the story: Don't upgrade your image. Rebuild it with a newly installed (and updated) OS. 

[Jeff Harris]

On 10/30/2017 at 12:06 PM, lphooper03 said:

Moral of the story: Don't upgrade your image. Rebuild it with a newly installed (and updated) OS. 

Yes! Always do this!

[eburnett]

Thanks,

This helps lots.

 

[eburnett]

Downloaded new windows media, recreated image - problem with sysprep not firing still persists with fall creators update. Updated to v.2097 updated answer files and deployment packages, able to deploy properly now - still monitoring (issue with custom platform package for hp slice elite not recognized). Clients self updated to new version. So far so good, thanks SD  

[eburnett]

Attempting to load SDE as a stand alone console, one thing that made me hesitant to upgrade from the get go was "upsetting the system" having to deal with new quirks. Now that I have it working again, I'd like to put it on a separate host - I'm quickly running into pitfalls, SD is only recognizing physical drives, a few things I'm looking for:

Want my network drive to be smartdeploy on a share name I designate (tools feature)

Want images, packages, answer files, deployment packages, etc. to be searched on newly setup console from directory I designate, rather than import 

Ability to create references and capture images on my workstation, and deploy from a stand alone console

Query console for heartbeats OR clients report to dummy (main) console show on any console (for computer management and deployment)

 

please consider for future revisions and upgrades.

[rdwollenberger]

I agree with eburnett. I"d like to have SmartDeploy installed on a server (always on) but be able to run a console from my desktop and create media to the USB drive at my desk rather than in the server room. Also, like for SDE to recognize fully being installed on a drive other than C:\ (And Windows adksetup installed on a drive other than c:\