I’ve been testing scanstate in Offline mode while in Windows PE in the last few days for Windows XP to Windows 7 migrations and it’s impressive and fast, so I thought this would be a good way of showing you how the process works using some screenshots and links to info.
First of all we start with a Windows XP desktop, nothing fancy, I’ve just dumped 2.5GB of data onto the desktop for the Demo.
All of this data will migrate via scanstate in offline MODE while in Windows PE. So let’s get started with that and reboot into PXE to start the process. I’m doing this in a hyperV environment which is great for testing and I highly recommend you have a virtual environment for testing/demoing.
As the screenshot says press F12 for network service boot. The reason we are seeing this is because I have advertised Optional Task Sequences to my Migrate Windows XP to Windows 7 X86 collection. Having the task sequences optional instead of Mandatory means you get to choose which one you want from a list (provided that there are more than one Task Sequence). Once the Task Sequence wizard starts we can be prompted for a password, in this example we have none.
And then we see our list of task sequences, in this particular example only two optional task sequences are advertised to this collection, so that’s all we see. Select the appropriate one and click next.
The task sequence starts and the appropriate variables are set, then folders are created and finally packages and files are xcopy’d into place.
Once everything is in place, we kick off scanstate in Offline mode by initiating the scanstate batch file which all takes place in the do X86 Scanstate step.
When scanstate is done hardlinking in OFFLINE mode in Windows PE, the task sequence downloads the windows 7 WIM which we captured before.
Then the drive is wiped which deletes all of Windows XP but leaves our migrated and hardlinked data in c:\usmtoffline along with logs files and the captured Windows 7 wim…
Windows 7 wim gets applied
And then windows Reboots
After the reboot we see the Windows 7 boot screen
Windows setup starts installing devices etc…Installs the configmgr client…and Reboots again
and then Restores all the migrated data (this bit requires that you set the following variable, otherwise it will fail with USMT error 38)
OSDMigrateAdditionalRestoreOptions=/Hardlink
/nocompress
And finally we see the Windows 7 login screen.
We login as the same Domain user that we migrated, (testuser)
And that’s it, the data is all migrated using Offline mode while in Windows PE. Cool huh ?
If you want to download the Task Sequences used above, click here
