CC4 - Failing on "Partitioning Disks".

[Sam_Brown]

Trying to build a new laptop on CC4 (I usually smart build but we have about 30 of these so want to try and get them done over the network if I can).

 

Laptops are ASUS X551CA and came with Windows 8 installed. I had a hell of a time just enabling me to PXE boot and get that far by disabling various bits and bobs in the BIOS.

 

Manage to download boot image and get enter in relevant details like machine name however it fails at the "Partitioning Disks" stage.

 

Trying to figure out if this is some kind of Windows 8 issue or something CC4 side such as missing drivers.

 

Can anyone shed any light? Worst comes to the worst I'll manually install Windows 7 and smart client but wanted to spend a little while trying to get them building on the network first and see if anyone on here could help.

[APMerry]

Do you have the hard drive set to AHCI or Legacy in the BIOS? I had this problem, found the best solution was to first format the drives with a windows 7 disc and then build them.

[Sam_Brown]

Believe I've tried both AHCI and Legacy.

 

Not tried formatting yet. Was going to be the next on my list. Cheers.

[APMerry]

Yeah I think that's the only way to do it as the drives are formatted differently for Windows 8.

[jaf]

Hey, RM are aware of this issue and have a tech article on it. If you have CC4.5 you can select an option as part of the build which says "prepare Windows 8 partition for CC4" or something along those lines.

 

If you don't have CC4.5 you have to manually format the disk as a MBR partition. Windows 8 preinstalled on a device is sometimes formatted as a GPT partition which the CC4 build disk cannot read hence failing on partitioning disks.

 

To solve the issue create a Windows PE disk, or use a windows 8 or Windows 7 DVD. You can create a windows pe CD quite easily, have a look on the net for info. If using a windows 8 or 7 DVD boot from it and choose repair computer and open the command prompt.

When at the command prompt run the following commands

Diskpart

List disk

Select disk (select the disk number here of your hard disk)

Clean

Exit

 

That's it, you should be able to build to CC4.

 

Hope that helps, sorry if my instructions aren't accurate but that's the general idea!

[Sam_Brown]

Genius. That worked a treat. Thanks for all your help gents.

 

Oh and how do I get hold of CC4.5 or check if I have it? I assume I don't as I didn't have the option to "prepare windows 8 partition".

[jaf]

Great, glad that worked. I gave you slightly incorrect info - you get the message "Prepare computer for installing pre-Windows 8 Operating System" on CC4.4 and CC4.5. These are the versions of CC4 which support Windows 8, CC4.5 being the newest version of CC4. If you can build to Windows 8 from a build disk then you have CC4.4 and above and should see that option. I'm unsure of the upgrade path from CC4.3 to CC4.5 so I'd speak to RM regarding that, I think you should be able to add the option to build a Windows 8 PC from a build disk just by installing some extra components onto your network, providing you have a RM subscription and Windows Server 2008+. Hope that helps.