MDT 2012 Beta 1–Unable to Select “Automatically determine the location” in the User Data page of Deployment Wizard

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MDT2012Beta1

“Automatically determine the location” Grayed Out in User Data page of Deployment Wizard

I downloaded the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Beta 1 to update my demo machines and work on doing some MDT 2012 Beta 1 screencasts.  One of the first things I found was my generic demo environment  worked fine in MDT 2010 to refresh a Windows XP machine.  With the new MDT 2012 Beta 1 it wouldn’t let me select “Automatically determine the location” so my machine could to a hard-link migration during the refresh. 

How Does This Problem Manifest Itself? 

When I got to the User Data pane in the new MDT 2012 Deployment Wizard, the “Automatically determine the location” grayed out, meaning I can’t select it and have my machine do a hard-link migration.  Why is that?  The reason for this is a change in MDT2012 Deployment Wizard UI.  MDT 2010 would allow “Automatically determine the location” to be selected regardless of whether you had UDShare variable configured.  On the other hand MDT 2012 Beta 1 doesn’t make this choice available unless you have a UDShare configured in customsettings.ini, or the database.  UDShare tells the deployment where to put the USMT user data if your machine does not have enough disk space, (250mb free space), to do the hard-link migration.

You can see below a couple of screenshots to show my environment with the problem, and what needed to be done to make the problem go away.  Smile

1-Before CustomSettingsINI

Fig 1. My generic customsettings.ini is shown above. Note I haven’t added any customizations.

 

1-Unable to choose Automacally Determine the location

Fig 2.   As you can see, my User Data pane in the deployment Wizard has “Automatically determine the location” grayed out.

2-2012 CustomSettingsINI

Fig 3.   Added the UDShare=\\SEA-DC-01\MigData$ to my customsettings.ini. This now gives it a share to save the user data to if my machine doesn’t have 250mb of free space.

 

3-Able to choose Automacally Determine the location

Fig 4. Now that I have UDShare variable in customsettings.ini, you can see that “Automatically determine the location” is not longer grayed out!!