This post is part of SCCM Current Branch Installation Guide series
In this post we are going to cover the installation of ADK (latest version is 1809)  & Windows PE Add-on which is a prerequisite for SCCM Installation.

What is ADK

ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit) consists of tools required for Operating System Deployment such as WinPE boot Images, Deployment Tools, USMT etc. Starting with ADK 1809 version WinPE is separately released from ADK. Hence, complete installation of ADK consists of 2 components:

  1. Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 1809
  2. Windows PE add-on for ADK

Installation of Windows ADK offline(version 1809)

Download Windows ADK 1809 and save adksetup.exe to your desired location. adksetup.exe is not the complete setup for installation, instead it requires internet connection to fetch all the required binaries. We will first download the binaries, which can be later used on any system for installation.

Once downloaded, launch adksetup.exe, specify the location to download the binaries.

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Once download is completed to above mentioned path (d:\downloads\Windows Kits\10\ADK), launch adksetup.exe once again from this new location which now contains the binaries under “installers” folder. Specify the location for installation:

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Under “Select the features you want to install”, make sure following is selected:

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Click on Install to begin the installation

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Installation of Windows PE Add-on for ADK

Similar to ADK installation, we will first download the Windows PE Add-on exe. Once downloaded, we will download the binaries first before installation it so that it can be used on any other server also (without having any internet connection).

Launch adkwinpesetup.exe and specify the path to download the binaries

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Once binaries are downloaded, launch adkwinpesetup.exe from location d:\ADKWinPEAddons, and specify the location for installation

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Under “Select the features you want to install”, there will be only one option available “Windows PE”, make sure it is selected and click on install to complete the installation

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