# Sunday, June 22, 2008

I'm not sure how I missed this one or how long it has been available but you can download the source code for MDT 2008 from Microsoft Download. You can learn a lot about how MDT 2008 works and also a lot about managed MMC snap-ins from the MDT 2008 source code. Click here to download.

posted on Sunday, June 22, 2008 10:18:04 PM (E. Australia Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, June 17, 2008

I spotted an article on Micheal Niehaus' blog the other day about moving to a single partition when doing OS deployments. You can read the article here.

This very issue arose in the project I am currently involved in and after trying reading and implementing Micheal's post I found a couple of nuances:

  • If there is an OEM partition (like WinRE) then you risk deleting you're OS partition. OEM partitions are often a hidden partition (Type 0x27) at the start of the disk that allow OEM's to offer a recovery environment for their customers.
  • If there is more than a one extra partition on the disk then ExtendOemPartition=1 won't really work.

I thought the problem deserved some more attention so I've written a script to be included in the "Refresh only" section of "Preinstall" in the Task Sequence that you use to deploy you're image. The script queries WMI to find how many partition are on the disk that contains C:. If there are any partitions after the C: partition they are removed using diskpart "delete partition".

Any comments or suggestions please let me know!

posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 2:26:12 PM (E. Australia Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]