TIP: "OEM" Copy Replacement with MDT

For many years the “OEM” folder has been a method for copying files to the local hard drive of a machine while it was being built.

The idea was simply that anything in a particular folder would be copied to a specific drive during the Windows installation process.

The $OEM$ folder method is no longer available to modern Windows deployments.  The next best thing is a replacement process using MDT.

This link contains a simple MDT script which will copy any files from an MDT folder structure to the SYS drive of a Windows install.  Using Microsoft’s Deployment Toolkit, extract the contents into the MDT Scripts folder.  This will create a directory called “SYSDrive” that can be used to hold files that need to be copied during the install process.

In my MDT based task sequence, I add an action to call the script using the MDT Variable ScriptRoot. 

The result is to have files always copied to a local drive during the install process.

This is extremely useful for when files need to be present during Windows setup and can’t be delivered afterward as applications.