With our SCCM OS deployments, I like to install some of the ‘driver apps’ that come with our Dell machines, such as the Intel Management Engine Components (AMT), Bluetooth, and Rapid Storage Technology. But for a long time the Rapid Storage Technology always bugged me because I couldn’t install it during a task sequence, either during deployment or after. It would give some ‘fatal error during installation’ message that wasn’t very helpful. Since it wasn’t critical to include it, I didn’t investigate too much further, but with the new Dell 7000 series laptops, it’s a requirement to install the Intel RST version 12.8 in order for the encryption software we use to work. So I decided to dig around a bit to get this working.
I used the ServiceUI tool from MDT to create an interactive installation during a task sequence, and then I discovered it was trying to log to a folder in the user profile area, which it couldn’t do for some reason, even though it could when installing outside of a task sequence.
It turns out there is a simple fix, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier! I extracted the SetupRST.exe file using 7Zip, and inside were 2 msi files, one each for x86 and x64. These can be deployed successfully during a task sequence using the standard unattended program that SCCM creates for MSI packages.
It does however force a reboot, because it updates the storage controller driver, so if you don’t want that to happen during the task sequence, be sure to add the ‘REBOOT=ReallySuppress’ switch to the msiexec command, eg:
msiexec.exe /q ALLUSERS=2 /m MSIDTJBS /i “RST_x64.msi” REBOOT=ReallySuppress
Problem solved 🙂
