Today, I stumbled upon this question on Reddit. As I thought the tip was not widely known, I made this quick post to spread the info!
I’ve personally used this technic for more than five years without any issue, so you can safely use it.
Context
You’ve made a deployment share and created a media out of it. Then, with a tool like Rufus, you applied the ISO to a USB stick. After an unsuccessful deployment you need to edit your deployment share, rebuild your media and apply it again…. until next bug…
Editing on the fly
This process is just too much time consuming for the life of deployment guy. There’s so much task in our daily job when we need to wait, there must be a faster way!
Yes there is, and it’s dead easy, just follow those steps:
- Open MDT, right click on the Deployment Shares node and click on Open Deployment share
- On the wizard pane, fill in the path as follow: <Your USB drive letter>:\Deploy
- Bada bing bada boom, enjoy the magic, you can now edit your USB media!
Side Notes
This tip will save you countless hours but don’t forget that the changes will only occur on the flash drive. At some point, you'll need to back port your changes to your original deployment share!
If your media is an ISO for a VM, you can’t use this trick, but that doesn’t means that your are struck! For those situations, You can use a tool called WinISO to edit the ISO on the fly (Endless thanks to Bill A Moore for pointing me to this tool.). The tool is not free but his value is priceless if you are in the deployment business!