Using MDT 2010 to Deploying Windows 7 to a MacBook / BootCamp Partition?

I am in an interesting situation involving the deployment of Windows 7 on Apple hardware utilizing the ‘BootCamp’ feature in OS X (10.5 and 10.6).

The IT support management of the various subunit’s wants to be able to deploy (via LTI) Windows 7 Enterprise x86 to MacBook’s while protecting the integrity of the Mac OS X operating system that has already been installed (and in some cases, heavily configured).

The environment they have for Lite Touch goes as follows…They have a brand new Lab / Staging server running Server 2008 R2 and MDT 2010 RC x64 with Windows 7 WAIK RTM. Their soon to be ‘Production’ Deployment Share is hosted on DFS share on a SAN with Deduplication enabled (to handle the ‘bulk’ created by linked deployment shares across the several subunits utilizing this technology throughout the campus). They have a SQL 2005 database sitting behind all of this.

They have been running BDD 2007 / MDT 2008 for the past few years and their environment has been very stable from what they tell me (We did not set it up for them). They have recently upgraded to MDT2010 and have been experimenting with Windows 7 deployment for the past several months and have pretty much ‘got it’ except for this one item of concern.

I have been jamming away on this issue for few days without real success. The central staff would prefer a situation that does not require a large amount of custom scripts as they are concerned about future manageability, although, I have a suspicion that is what this will come to. At first, I had hypothesized that I would do something like this:

1) Set DoNotCreateExtraPartition=YES to prevent the BDE partition from being created automatically.

2) Remove the Disk Part step from the task sequence that would be used for these deployments (so that Disk 0 was not automatically formatted)

3) Remove the ‘Install To’ section in the Unattend.xml file so that the installer did not try to place the image automatically on to Disk 0 Partition 1

4) Set the UI to always show (in the Unattend.xml) for the disk partitioning wizard within the Windows 7 Setup UI.

a. My thought process here is that this wizard comes up within 1 or 2 minutes of the LTI processing being kicked off and does not take that long to complete.

b. This would also add a extra level of protection against an accidental formatting of the users OS X partition.

c. Now, the BOOTCAMP partition almost exclusively resides on Disk 0 Partition 3, However, I brought up the concern that if a student (or staff member) made a additional OSX partition BEFORE creating the BOOTCAMP partition, this would push the partition to Disk 0 Partition 4 or beyond (so I did not want to try to build a logic that looked for that partition at that location).

5) Move the Copy Scripts step to after the Install Operating System step.

When I first tested this theory inside a VMware ESX environment, it worked perfectly. I also tried it on a desktop that had a blank hard drive in it and a desktop that had multiple NTFS partitions on it (and it did not modify them until I formatted them in the disk utility wizard in the Windows 7 Setup.

However, it does not work when attempted on a Mac that had been ‘prepared’ by the Boot Camp utility in OS X. I get the following errors stored in the BDD log (that I setup to go to the network share to try to debug this thing).

<![LOG[using specified ImageSize = 7930]LOG]!><time="23:01:38.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIValidate" context="" type="1" thread="" file="ZTIValidate">

<![LOG[Assuming that the drive has enough disk space (once cleaned)]LOG]!><time="23:01:38.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIValidate" context="" type="1" thread="" file="ZTIValidate">

<![LOG[ZTIValidate processing completed successfully.]LOG]!><time="23:01:38.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIValidate" context="" type="1" thread="" file="ZTIValidate">

<![LOG[Verifying that the Disk and Partition exists]LOG]!><time="23:01:39.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIConfigure" context="" type="1" thread="" file="ZTIConfigure">

<![LOG[Found Disk and Partition]LOG]!><time="23:01:39.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIConfigure" context="" type="1" thread="" file="ZTIConfigure">

<![LOG[The logical drive could not be determined from the disk and partition]LOG]!><time="23:01:39.000+000" date="08-25-2009" component="ZTIConfigure" context="" type="3" thread="" file="ZTIConfigure">

Now, I did notice that the BOOTCAMP partition is formatted FAT32 by default. I opened a command prompt before clicking ‘finish’ in LTI and formatted that volume to be NTFS and it was still a no go, citing the same exact error. Extensive googling and crawling various deployment forums have yielded no results.

Thanks in advance for any help,

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