MDT 2012 U1 - Windows 8 Pro and LTISuspend

Question

Hi guys,
Part way through testing our deployment for Windows 8 and I'm looking at automating the image creation with MDT (as is the best practice).  I'm trying to use LITSuspend in the task sequence to install a couple of apps that need special attention while
we test.
I was under the impression that you LTISuspend will pause the task sequence indefinitely until the script is run again from the desktop,  I am starting to find that this is not the case.  What I need to do is paus, install an application,
do several restarts and then continue with the task sequence.  At the moment it will pause no problem, but when I restart, it continues with the 'Applying WinPE' and sysprep stages.
Is this the expected behaviour or is something going wrong? 

Answer 1

I happened upon this thread when looking for a similar answer. I am getting underway with MDT 2013 to create a reference image and despite using LTISuspend.wsf, the suspend was not surviving reboots. My intention is to fully automate the process
but in the short term I have some testing and manual tweaks to make. Pausing a task sequence like this to make changes is acceptable (sometimes you have some interface tweaks to make that are hard to script) but probably not ideal; but taking a snapshot
of a VM right after the suspend is a great way to come back without re-running the entire sequence so that you can dig in to poke around for learning purposes or make some of your changes. I've seen Johan Arwidmark and Mykael Nystrom talk about this very
concept and its usefulness in MMS 2013 session DC-B306 'Building the Perfect Windows 8 Image' available online.
Regardless, I wanted to share - as of MDT 2013 (I realize this thread started with 2012 U1) - that once I was paused I found there is a critical RunOnce registry value that must be removed if you want any hope of surviving reboots before you resume
the sequence. The exact value is here:
hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\runonce\LiteTouch
String data with value = wscript.exe "C:\MININT\Scripts\LiteTouch.wsf"
Test for yourself and don't take my word conclusively that this is the only hook of concern, I am just reporting that it seems to help in my testing. You can write a couple simple scripts to take this out and then put it back like so:
To disable (remove key to prevent reboot interference):
$regPath = "hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\runonce"
Remove-ItemProperty -path $regPath -name "LiteTouch" -force
To enable (get ready to resume task sequence):
$regPath = "hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\runonce"
New-ItemProperty -path $regPath -PropertyType string -name "LiteTouch" `
-value 'wscript.exe "C:\MININT\Scripts\LiteTouch.wsf"' -force