capturing an imageof windows 7 on wds

[thesk8rjesus]

we have just got a copy of windows 7 pro RTM and now looking into how easy it would be to change our network over to all server 2008 R2 and windows 7 pro. So i was given the task of creating a machine to then image, i am using a dell optiplex 745.i installed all the software onto the machine then ran sysprep it restarted then i went into our capture but it wasn't showing that i could capture the C:\ any ideas?

[DevilsAdvocate]

Did you tick the 'Generalize' box? Doesn't work on our Dell 760's unless we do. Be warned, you can only sysprep the image 3 times with the 'Generalize' option as it resets the grace period for activation.

Rob

[thesk8rjesus]

Did you tick the 'Generalize' box?

there isn't a 'Generalize' box to tick, i am using the windows 7 sysprep and all it does is run then restarts the machine, i think that it might be the sysprep that im using, but if i use the one that came with windows xp, the machine losses key files and can cause explorer.exe to become curpted.

[DevilsAdvocate]

You using the sysprep in the System32 folder?

Should look like this (Windows 7 Pro)

[thesk8rjesus]

yes i am using the one in the system32 folder, but i am not recieving that box.

[TheCrust]

You might want to check to see how your Windows 7 installation partitioned the disk when you did your original setup.

We had the same problem with the RC during testing and then with the 7 Enterprise image we used after RTM. Initially I just put it down to the new OS being beta, then my lack of understanding of it but when I looked at the installation in more detail, I noticed that the initial OS setup had created TWO partitions on the disk: a 100Mb or so boot partition, and then the rest of the disk partitioned for the system.

I think the WDS capture boot image - even if you update your boot images off the Windows 7 DVD - doesn't seem to understand this configuration, so it fails.

I assumed in our case that Windows 7 setup had pre-created the seperate partition to enable bitlocker, even though we haven't actually turned it on yet, because my reference PC had a TPM module in it but now I'm not so sure as every WDS installation we do of our final 7 image does the same on any PC around school - TPM equipped or not.

How are you building your initial image? I guess you could use the unattended.xml file to force it into a single partition but we found that using SCCM to create the initial installation would stick the OS into a single partition irrespective of the reference PC hardware, and then we could capture into WDS normally and deploy from that point on.

Curiously, WDS installs it back into two partitions - but our initial reference image is built by SCCM in a single partition that WDS seems quite happy to capture afterwards.

Is that any help to you?

[plexer]

Looks like it is for bitlocker use:

Hack to Remove 100 MB System Reserved Partition When Installing Windows 7 My Digital Life

Ben