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Windows 10, Version 1909 and UEFI Flash Drives: How to avoid disabling Secure Boot

If you work in IT (and/or you’ve ever read this site), you’ve probably created USB Bootable Media to reinstall an Operating System before. With Windows (since 2015 specifically), a wonderful tool called Rufus has made this process much simpler than it used to be, with a 4(ish) click process to go from downloaded ISO to bootable USB drive in a snap. Unfortunately, Microsoft made things a bit more difficult for us with Windows 10, Version 1909.

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Why are my Windows 10 Devices updating via Microsoft Update and not SCCM?

Update (10/23/17): Microsoft has provided a new GPO in 1709 ADMX that (helps) resolve this issue!  Go here and learn what’s needed.

So, this is an extremely frustrating situation I recently ran into within the organization I work for. Following the Official Microsoft Installation Procedures, I installed SCCM CB 1702 and configured Windows 10 updates using System Center Configuration Manager (see here).

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Creating Customized Windows 10 Version 1703 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive)

It’s April 2017 and Microsoft has just released their fourth update / “version” of Windows 10 – externally referred to as the “Creators Update”. Since I haven’t updated my “How To” on creating customized Windows media since Windows 8.1, I think we’re overdue for a follow up. So let’s get into it!

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Windows 10 Brings Back Split WIM Support

Microsoft has listened. In my previous Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media post, I detailed how to deploy a customized Windows 8.1 image utilizing UEFI with two different USB flash drives. The need for two drives stemmed from the fact that Microsoft removed split WIM support, thus resulting in a single file greater than 4096 MB, which isn’t allowed on FAT32 partitions – the requirement for UEFI boot. Utilizing two drives allowed us to UEFI boot off one FAT32 drive, but have the WIM on a second NTFS formatted drive.

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Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 2

In Part 1 we used Hyper-V to build, update, and sysprep our custom Windows 8.1 Installation. Now we need to make some Install media!

If you’re unfamiliar with this process, or you haven’t built customized Windows media since the XP days, you may not be familiar with WIM files. Essentially, the WIM file is a compressed image which is deployed during Windows installation. (Think of it like extracting a large .ZIP file.) If you take a look at your Windows 8.1 install media, you’ll find that amongst the plethora of files, the largest will be \Sources\install.wim – approximately 3.1 GB on x64 media.

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Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 1

I’m sure this is something everyone has (or will) have to tackle at some point in their Windows IT career – creating a customized version of Windows for the office, for the enterprise, or for a specific one-off scenario. I’ve gone through the steps many times, and each time I seem to do things a little bit differently.

Recently, I wanted to create my own customized version of Windows 8.1 Enterprise. This isn’t for work, it’s for me. I’m constantly having to reimage my PC(s) for personal projects, and I got tired of re-downloading all the updates and re-installing all my apps. This is something I had been putting off for a while, but now that it’s completed, I wanted to document the steps I took, and more importantly, what worked.

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