Computer name for the WinPE

Question

_{Wednesday, March 4, 2015 6:05 PM}

I'm trying to make a tool my technicians can use to create a backup image for an existing machine.

What I thought of was using a BAT that I could inject into my Boot images and run some really simple DISM command:

Dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:D:\computername%.wim /CaptureDir:C:\ /Name:"Captured Image"

Problem is the %computername% to name the WIM keeps comming up as MINWINPC.wim. It's not even the MININT-xxxxxx computer name that WinPE generates. 

Maybe I'm not using the command correctly, but is there a way I can make the computer name something identifiable, like the computer's serial #?

All replies (3)

_{Wednesday, March 4, 2015 6:50 PM ✅Answered}

One way to get around this is to load the registry of the offline computer in WinPE and get the computer name from there. Computer names are stored in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName\ComputerName and the value ComputerName.

You can find instructions for loading the offline computer's registry hive here:

http://superuser.com/questions/636055/how-to-modify-a-computers-offline-registry-from-winpe

Otherwise, you could have the script prompt for the computer name and the tech can manually enter it in.

_{Wednesday, March 4, 2015 7:19 PM ✅Answered}

Another possibility is to simply query WMI for the serial number and use that instead of %computername%.

Jason | http://blog.configmgrftw.com | @jasonsandys

_{Wednesday, March 4, 2015 7:25 PM ✅Answered}

Just throwing this out. . .if ConfigMgr is integrated with MDT, there is a ztibackup.wsf script that can be used for backing up to a WIM file.  In one case I have seen a task sequence created that utilizes that script along with a custom *.wsf that prompts for a computer name and stores it in a variable.  The WIM is then named according to the manually entered computer name.

That TS is then deployed to a collection and devices are added to it as needed.

Just another take on your use case.

Jeff