Zak's IT Blog

In the past posts I have explained how to create a task sequence to update / refresh computers to Windows 7 from Windows XP.  Most of the time this all works fine and I can just sit back and watch as the computers refresh themselves. Sometimes, though, that is not always the case as I will explain. Sometimes my task sequences will fail at the 'Restore User Files and Settings' group. It usually happens on laptops. From what I have seen it's because the laptops have went into hibernation, powered down, or have lost network connectivity at this step. What this means is that the State Store has been saved to the State Migration Point, but the data is encrypted and you can't really do anything with it. You have a bare metal Windows 7 install with no user data. I've read a few ways to accomplish retrieving your data from the State Store, and I'll cover them here. Use MigRecover found  here . This method did not work for me at all . I tried both versions to no a...

I've came across this error a couple of times now. If you're receiving this error you will see it 3-4 times in your SMSTS.log file before your task sequence will fail. Giving you a generic task sequence error. Unless you look in the SMSTS.log you will not see this error. After looking through my settings on my State Migration Point, I noticed that I had only 15 clients with Complete/In-Progress status. Well that should be fine as I have set my client max to 50. The catch is the days I had set to retain my migration data. This was set to 30 days. This is pretty high , I know. I had it set this high because the is a new rollout and I didn't want to lose anyone's data. I wanted to have plenty of time to recover it if I needed to. So even though my clients max was set to 50 and the SCCM console was only showing 15 Completed/In-progress. My Migration Point had the meta data for over 100 still stored. This was caused by me just deleting associations out of the console and...