RIS EISA Partition removal

[x9731091]

New PCs, such as Dell, tend to come with an EISA FAT partition containing diagnostic tools. This is unnecessary for our environment.

Under 'Disk Management' EISA partitions are hidden, i.e. they have no drive letter assigned.

[RemoteInstall]

Repartition=yes

Does not remove this partition. This upsets me.

Is there a way to resolve this problem using only the SIF file? (I know that you can use BartPE and various other tools).

I have seen an example where 'repartition=yes' has to be under [unattended] but I am running this off a RIS server. If this is the case, why? What is the point of [remoteinstall] if it does not work?

Edited October 30, 2006 by x9731091

[cluberti]

Have you tried also adding the "AutoPartition = 1" setting under the [Data] section of the .sif file? That, coupled with the "Repartition = YES" setting should wipe the entire boot volume and format one large NTFS partition.

[x9731091]

That's the problem, Repartition=yes is not wiping the entire volume. I have just tried adding it to the [unattended] section and that did not work either.

(I can of course set repartition=no, but I'd rather not have to do it manually.)

It seems the repartition option has problems with fat partitions that do not have a drive letter. Perhaps it interprets this as a non-windows partition (repartition will not work on non-windows partitions)

Edited October 31, 2006 by x9731091

[cluberti]

That is always possible. It's situations like these that led me to ultimately use WinPE to script and install all of my OSes from RIS, as it's much easier to have a "base" WinPE image that does partition creation, hardware checking, etc., then kicks off the proper OS installation afterwards.

[soxfan4]

That is always possible. It's situations like these that led me to ultimately use WinPE to script and install all of my OSes from RIS, as it's much easier to have a "base" WinPE image that does partition creation, hardware checking, etc., then kicks off the proper OS installation afterwards.

Hello everybody,

I read through this form and I have a similar scenario with the Dell utility partition on an Optiplex GX 745. I spent all this time setting up RIS on Windows 2003 ,setting up DHCP, and finding the right network driver (annoying) only to get stuck on the partitioning. The entire RIS process worked flawlessly on the machine we ran riprep from (225GB SATA HD in Source machine) but then again it was one Hard Disk that was formatted with one partition (C: 225GB) and we loaded XP PRO SP2 with our OEM VL CD. However, we then tried to image an Optiplex GX 745 with an 80GB SATA HD which also has the Dell Utility Partition on it we keep recieving the error below.

"Setup cannot copy the operating system image you selected. This computer does not have enough disk space on the selected partition. Contact your system administrator.

Is this because the machine we ran RipRep from had a 225 GB HD and the machine to recieve the image only has an 80GB HD?

Will it still be possible for RIS too blast the Dell utility partition or tweak the sif file somehow to keep the Dell Utility partition intact?

I would really appreciate your input or any and all recommendations for this issue? Thanks!