Daily Archives: 13 November 2013

MDT 2012 will HideShell=YES and LTISuspend.wsf work together in one task sequence?

Published / by Rens Hollanders / 6 Comments on MDT 2012 will HideShell=YES and LTISuspend.wsf work together in one task sequence?

Short answer: YES 😀

Recently I have created a Build Task Sequence for a customer where it was needed to do some checks upfront, before the operating system, running on a virtual machine would be captured to a WIM file.

As some of you might know, the LTISuspend.wsf script, residing in the SCRIPTROOT of MDT (DeploymentShare\Scripts), can be called after the ‘State Restore’ step in the task sequence.

At any given moment, but preferably under the ‘Custom Action’s’ folder, create a ‘Run Command Line’, with the following commandline: “cscript.exe %SCRIPTROOT%\LTISuspend.wsf”

figure 1.1: Suspend Task Sequence Step

LTISuspend_ts

this will postpone the task sequence and create a shortcut on the desktop called ‘Resume Task Sequence’. However when using the following property in your customsettings.ini: “HideShell=YES”, your desktop shell will not be fully loaded, thus it would be possible that no desktop, taskbar and other icons where presented during the LTISuspend.wsf.

figure 1.2: No Explorer Shell

TS Progress

Luckily this isn’t the case. When the machine is suspended and HideShell is set to YES in the customsettings.ini the task sequence will be succesfully postponed, however the Windows theme, will be set to basic, as we can see by the screenshot I took:

figure 1.3: Suspended Task Sequence

LTISuspend

So use it with confidence!

Keep on automating my young padawan learners! 😀