Things to consider for capturing and deploying a Windows 11 image

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite
• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

Windows 11 has been released and the customer wants to capture and deploy an image containing this OS version. 

Environment

Ghost Solution Suite (GSS) 3.3 RUX
Deployment Solution (DS) 8.x

See our Windows 11 Support Statement for support versions.

Resolution

As far as the process goes, there is not much difference in what is currently done with Windows 10 capture and deployment.

See Ways to install Windows 11

Please refer to:

• For GSS:

KB 171149 "Preparing Windows 10 to run Sysprep through Ghost Solution Suite Capture Image Task"

• For DS:

KB 161011 "Preparing Windows 10 to run a 'Prepare for Image Capture' (Sysprep) task using Deployment Solution 7.x/8.x"

WinPE 11 should be used if capturing/deploying a Windows 11 Image in a pre-boot environment.

Having TPM 2.0 turned on (since it is required by Windows 11 now) should not be a problem. An image install of Windows 11 will not check for the following requirements: TPM 2.0 (at least TPM 1.2 is required) and CPU family and model. You can always turn it off in BIOS. 

Secure boot and BitLocker are the possible ones that could give problems during capture and deployment.

If BitLocker is turned on, disable it.
Run command "manage-bde -status" from the command prompt as Administrator on the desired machine to see the actual status of BitLocker.
In some cases it may show "turn off" in Windows UI, but is actually enabled but waiting for activation. in this case it is required to go to Control Panel > Bitlocker and

  a) click on: enable Bitlocker and set a password.

  b) Once the drive is encrypted go back and disable BitLocker to decrypt the drive

See KB 221581 "Image capture taking much longer than usual and creating a very large image" 

One more thing to mention, it seems that enabled secure boot causes mentioned use case when BitLocker is shown as turned off in GUI, but actually, encryption is performed. So customers should take into account such Microsoft behavior.

Additional Information

KB 163312 "Ghost Solution Suite support for secure boot"