Deployment Solution

I was wondering if anyone else has run into issues with creating and deploying a Windows 8.1 image?

I was able to get the image to deploy by capturing the image following this TECH article but now when it deploys, I have a black screen with no Start menu or tiles and I can only log in as a local administrator or domain administrator. When I try and log in as a user on the domain, it immediately goes to a screen that says logging out. Also, the TECH article suggested creating an additional local administrator account and I did so. When I log in as that account, everything appears correctly.

I can see that the applications I installed are on the image by browsing Windows Explorer and using the run command but basically there are no icons or anything to click, you can only use the run commands to launch anything.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for what I can do to get this to work?

I had some issues capturing Windows 8 on Microsoft Surface 3 tablets. The built-in prepare image for capture task would crash every time or cause some sort of corruption during its process. I would also get the black screen like you did if it made it that far at all. The above tech article along with this one:

https://superuser.com/questions/861319/sysprep-exe-fatal-error-and-cant-delete-metro-app-in-windows-8-to-get-it-worki

...got it working start to finish, but I ended up also running Sysprep manually and capturing manually by sysprepping, shutting down, boot into preboot env. and then running a create image task. Perhaps the above link would help, too? What kind of machine and partition layout are you working with?

Thanks for your response and I was finally able to get this to work. There was one other piece I discovered where a scheduled task runs about an hour after the OS installation that runs a pre-staged app cleanup (http://www.puryear-it.com/blog/2015/05/04/fix-error-3-14-sysprepping-windows-8-windows-8-1-pc/). I disabled this task and then ran the powershell command that was mentioned in the tech article -- but I only ran Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage. Then I sysprepped manually (OOBE, Generalize, Shutdown) and then booted into PXE and used initial deployment to run the create image task.