Using MDT to create a new partition?

[agarabaghi]

We are in the process of testing VMware VDI and wanted to test some of the VDI desktops in our labs. Instead of wiping the hdd on the lab machines and making them "thin" clients, i was wondering if there was a way in MDT 2010 to basically shrink the current partation ~100gigs and installed a fresh copy of windows 7 and some other software. I have been doing this manaually on some of our test machines and it works. If i could automate this and have it done to a couple machines in the lab it would serieous save some time.

 

Any suggestions?

[tmcd35]

Are the machines the same make/model? If so, if you've already set up one dual booting as you prefer can't you just use WDS to take an image of that machines HDD and rolling that out to the other machines? Or is there other data on the hard drives that would be lost if you copied an image from another machine?

[agarabaghi]

Ive never use WDS to take an image of a machine and deploy it. How do you deploy the image afterwards?

[tmcd35]

My bad, looks like WDS won't do it, sorry - take a look at this thread:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/o-s-deployment/95791-can-wds-deploy-windows-7-multiple-partitions.html

 

I think MDT might struggle. You might want to look at Clonezilla, as another option. Again, assuming you have 1 PC setup with two hard drive partitions that would work has you'd like on the other machines...

 

Clonezilla - About

 

The live CD should allow you to take an image of the first PC and then deploy that to the others. Partitions intact.

[free780]

Thought you could do a diskpart script in the TS. Getting it to apply the image to the correct partition could be fun.

[rdsc]

You should be able to do this with the Deploy to VHD task sequence in MDT2012 U1 - you don't need to re-partition if all you want to do is add a native boot, see Michael Niehaus's blog post. There are other ways of doing it where you copy over an already prepped .vhd, but this isn't really recommended as .vhd isn't a compressed file format like .wim

[garethEds]

How about this?

 

MDT 2012 and Custom Partition Formatting

 

Gareth