Running Deploy Anywhere Manually with ITMS Deployment Solution

Products

• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

NOTE: Scripting Deploy Anywhere and running it manually is not supported, but does usually work.

In older versions of Deploy Anywhere (GSS 2.5 and others) there was built in functionality to determine the active windows partition in the retargeting
phase. Previously it was possible to use the target switch in the following manor Deployanywhere.exe /target:1.1 which would tell DA to search and automatically choose the active Windows partition. In DS Deploy Anywhere no longer handles this functionality and relies on Ghconfig.exe to tell it where to look for the Windows partition. In the case where a bootable thumb drive is being used to boot a client into automation and run Ghost and DA manually say with a batch script this can present a problem.  From machine to machine the active windows partition can be different so hard coding the drive letter to the active windows partion won't work.  The only solution for this issue is to create a variable and pass it into the command line.  Below is a command.exe batch script that works around this issue.

In DA_Logs.txt located in X:/Program Files/Symantec/Deployment/Ghost after running the first Pass (Retargeting or /Eval phase) the following error is shown:

Error: Unable to create the retarget system object. The system volume specified cannot be retargeted to run on this computer.

End of DeployAnywhereMain().

DA Return code is 3(GH_ERROR).

Environment

DS 7.x
DS 8.X

Cause

The cause of this issue is a purposeful design change in DA from previous versions.

Resolution

The following batch script takes the return output of Ghconfig.exe and edit's it down to return a single drive letter such as D:.
It's probably best used in a batch file but can also be called by hand.

cd “x:\Program Files\Symantec\Deployment\Ghost”
GhConfig64.exe /findactivewindows > tmp.txt
Set /p drive=<tmp.txt
For /f %%i in (tmp.txt) do set drive=%%i
Set drive2=%drive:~1,-1%
deployanywhere64.exe /target=%drive2%\Windows /reportNonCriticalDevices /eval /rad /exportDevicesIntoFile=X:\Program Files\Symantec\Deployment\Logs

Note this command does produce a temporary text file that is not cleaned up.  A command such as del tmp.txt may need to be run to clean up the file at the end of the batch file.