Configure BGinfo within MDT 8443

Branding your MDT deployment experience can be very important. Using Microsoft’s BGinfo utility to customize your deployment process is simple, but it takes time depending on how much customization you want.

The cool thing about the latest MDT is that BGinfo is installed automatically within the tools folder. No need to download the BGinfo utility from the Microsoft site.

Depending on what environment you will boot into you have to go and configure the correct x64 or x86 BGinfo.exe file. For me, I’m in the x64 folder so the BGinfo64.exe application is the one I’m using to create our “stages” or *.bgi configuration files.

Once the BGinfo.exe application is started you will get many options to configure how the information is displayed during the deployment. Some of these options are the name of the computer, IP address, Memory, and Network information. This configuration depends on you and what you want to see during the deployment process of the MDT.

Each “stage” should have a different bitmap wallpaper assigned to it. On the show, I had different wallpaper indicating the stages of the deployment. This is when the work begins because depending how much customization you want creating multiple backgrounds and bgi configuration file will take some time. For myself, I created seven bgi configuration files and seven backgrounds. Each bgi configuration file has the same information (Host Name, Machine Domain and etc) but what changes is the background of each bgi configuration file.

I made life easy for myself by naming the background images and the bgi configuration file with the same naming format because we will need this when calling it out during the deployment process. Also make sure to save everything within the same location where the bginfo.exe. We’re using x64 of BGInfo64.exe application, so all the bgi configuration files and bitmap files are save in the same location where BGInfo64.exe is located (Tools\x64)

Depending on how many bgi configuration files and bitmap images you want you should have something like this below. I’m doing seven stages, so seven bitmaps and seven bgi configuration files are going to be in the x64 folder.

The next part is to have your Task Sequence to call out your custom bgi configuration files. Using copy and paste will save you a lot of time, so configure your first stage and create a “Command Line”

The command line for each of your “stages” will be (make sure to use the UNC patch):

\\bj-mdt\deploymentshare$\tools\x64\BGInfo64.exe \\bj-mdt\deployment$\tools\x64\Stage_01.bgi /nolicprompt /silent /timer:0

Once you create the first “Run Command Line” with the above. You can copy & paste it into the other area you want it to appear on your task sequence, but make sure you change the name of the bgi configuration file.

Hope this help, if any questions leave a comment and make sure to watch the video above because the steps were done during the The Server Room show.