sporticia

Another little Windows 7 nugget.

While installing Windows 7, I noticed that during the section for setting up the disk, some stuff was going on that I didn’t ask for (didn’t realise it at the time, took some trial and error to figure it out).

When you configure Windows 7 installation, the graphical section for configuring the disk will automatically create a 100MB primary partition for Bit Locker to use at a later stage. No matter what I did, I could not stop the GUI from doing this.

So I pressed on and agreed to the installation with the 100MB partition at the begining of the disk and the rest of the disk as a another primary partition.

Windows installs the *boot* files into the 100MB partition, and everything else into the second larger partition !

As I have mentioned before, I don’t think I am using WDS and imaging as Microsoft intended, but I essentially create a machine exactly how I want it and then sysprep and capture it using imagex. I can then reapply the image to another system of have it on the desktop in approx. 10-15mins all ready for use.

But this dual partition configuration breaks this. I believe to do it this way I would have to perform x2 sets of imagex capture and deploys :o( Not going to happen.

To get around this, I have to prepare the disk partitioning up front. The GUI disk section of the install will not alter the disk if it is already partitioned. I booted using a WINPE boot disk used ‘diskpart.exe /s ‘ and pass the following in a txt file as an argument

select disk 0
clean
create partition primary id=07
select partition 1
format fs=ntfs quick nowait
assign letter=c
active

This causes diskpart to select the first disk, wipe it clean and then create a primary partition using the whole disk, mark it as active and assign it drive letter C:

With the disk prepared in this way, I can now install Windows 7 (skipping over the GUI section of disk partitioning) and the boot files will be on the same partition as the system files. This can then be caught in a single image capture to .wim file which, when I then apply back to machines via WDS they will boot correctly.

Not sure of the implications this has should you then want to use Bitlocker at some later stage. Meh ! I don’t care, I don’t use Bitlocker right now :o)

Hope someone else finds this useful :o)