Perhaps the easiest way to create a pre staged image of Windows that includes all current updates plus any applications that you may want installed is to use audit mode and the sysprep tool to re-seal the image after you have made your changes.
In this post I won’t be talking about how to use audit mode, this post assumes that you already know how to do all of that to manage your staging. This post will however talk about a bit of an “issue” that has cropped up with Audit mode in windows 8.1. The problem is that you cannot actually use Windows Update in Audit mode since WU is now locked out when the OS has not completed OOBE. Supposedly the reason for this is to avoid the machine rebooting for updates during the OOBE experience, which neither myself nor anyone I have discussed this issue with have ever seen happen. For the curious here is the WindowsUpdate.log entry you will see if you try to use WU in audit mode (and realize that it’s stuck on checking for updates):
Windows OOBE is still in progress. AU deferring detection.
#WARNING: Failed to find updates with error code 8024a008
OOBE is in progress, so cannot perform Accelerated Install.
Anyway enough babbling and let’s get down to it.
Since WU is not usable in Audit Mode, there is another way to get updates from the internet to update your Windows image for deployment. For starters you need to download the following Powershell Module:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/2d191bcd-3308-4edd-9de2-88dff796b0bc
After you have downloaded the module, do the following:
1.) Copy the whole module folder (after unzipping) to %WINDIR%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules
2.) Start up PowerShell ISE as admin from admin tools
3.) Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
4.) Import-Module PSWindowsUpdate
5.) Get-WUInstall
6.) The rest should be automated with some prompts
**NOTE: Sometimes setting the execution policy to RemoteSigned doesn’t work, so in those cases temporarily set it to unrestricted, and then set it back after you have used the script to install all windows updates.
Anyway I hope this helps some of you who have probably been pulling your hair out over this, hopefully Microsoft will resolve this in the future and not just leave us with some BS excuse as to why this functionality was removed in Windows 8.1.