Skip to content

Making the Foundry Deploy Init Sequence cleaner #246

Description

@freedbygrace

Question scope

project: foundry-deploy

Question type

Contribution

Your question

I’ve written a couple of projects that may be useful for what you’re building. You’re doing something really solid here, and one of the best parts is that you’ve made the process relatively approachable once someone understands how to get the administrator machine set up.

[PSRecoveryPartition](https://github.com/Grace-Solutions/PSRecoveryPartition)

This module helps create a locally staged boot entry using Windows RE or a custom BCD entry as a local entry point for remote recovery scenarios. It can also stage the boot image in an expanded mode, so instead of booting directly from a WIM, the image is expanded onto a recovery partition and behaves more like a lightweight local OS. It is not the most common approach, but Microsoft does document the method here, and I think it could open up some useful recovery and deployment scenarios:

[WinPE: Install on a Hard Drive — Flat Boot or Non-RAM](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/winpe-install-on-a-hard-drive--flat-boot-or-non-ram?view=windows-11)

I’m also planning to put my implementation of this on GitHub.

[PowershellBootstrapper](https://github.com/Grace-Solutions/PowershellBootstrapper)

This project helps launch a bootstrapper script without the flashing command window that Windows PE normally shows when using StartNet.cmd. You could use Unattend.xml with PSBootstrapper to launch your bootstrapper ps1 script without the flashing windows, and the user would only see the clean fullscreen app once the initialization steps are complete. I’ve been using this approach for almost two years, and it has worked really well.

If any of this sounds useful, I’d be happy to connect over PM or email and jump on Zoom to talk through it. Let me know what you think either way.

Context

Image

Unattend.xml

Logs or screenshots

Checklist

  • I searched existing issues and documentation before submitting this question.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

questionUsage, setup, or contribution question

Type

No type

Fields

No fields configured for issues without a type.

Projects

Status
In Progress

Milestone

No milestone

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions