I’ve seen a few issues with removing default apps during Task Sequence build recently. The removal of the apps has been intermittently hanging in random places. Rebuild the device and it works.
Note – I’ve since been informed that October’s ISO updates will fix this for 1803 onwards, see here.
I decided that rather than remove the apps in online mode (full OS), I would do this in offline mode (WinPE). I had to put together a quick script to ensure that the removal steps were calling the correct drive in WinPE. Let me know if this fails for you and I can take a look to fix.
Since implementing this in offline mode, I’ve not had any problems removing default apps.
Basically, the OfflineDefaultAppRemovalTS.zip needs to be extracted and then imported into your ConfigMgr environment. The steps can then be copied into a build Task Sequence. I like to have all the steps individually then I can disable the steps when I want to keep a default app. It works well for me when moving from customer to customer.
Note that the following needs to be done as a pre-requisite:
- In the boot image add the following components to support PowerShell.
- Windows Powershell (WinPE-DismCmdlets)
- Windows Powershell (WinPE-StorageWMI)
- Windows Powershell (WinPE-Powershell)
- Microsoft .Net (WinPE-NetFx)
- Update the boot image after adding the PowerShell components
- When adding the steps into your build TS, add them after the Apply Operating System step.
To download the Task Sequence click here.
SCCMentor - Paul Winstanley 