Windows 2008 R2 / Windows 7 with Citrix PVS – System reserved partition issue
July 23, 2012 1 Comment
Now that I am done with a new XenApp 6.5 Farm, it is time to set up Citrix Provisioning 6.1 and convert the environment to a PVS managed farm.
Unfortunately after booting up a converted Windows 2008 R2 XenApp 6.5 server to a PVS disk with XenCovert, I received a “Please insert System Disk” error when booting up. After doing some research, I realized that that the System Reserved partition is not compatible for a Provisioned image. Note that this applies to Windows 7 as well.
Some facts:
If you install Windows 7/Windows 2008 on a clean disk with no existing partitions, it creates a System Reserved partition at the beginning of the disk and uses the remainder of the unallocated space to create your system drive. That small partition isn’t assigned a drive letter, so you won’t even know it exists unless you look in the Disk Management console or use a low-level utility, such as Diskpart, to inspect the disk structure.
Solutions:
1. Set up your Windows 7/ Windows 2008 R2 servers without the System Reserved partition:
Once Setup is loaded, press Shift + F10 keys at the first setup screen (which allows selection of language, keyboard and locale). A Command Prompt window will be opened.
Run Diskpart
Type in the following:
List disk (to show the ID number of the hard disk to partition, normally is Disk 0)
select disk 0 (change 0 to another number if applicable)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick
exit
Continue installation
2. Remove the System Reserve partion – In my case this is what I had to do since the server I wanted to convert to a PVS image was already finalized.
I found this solution in this article from terabyte however Carlo from VMwareinfo.com extracted the information into a simple to follow instructions.
Assign a drive letter to the System Reserved partition. I used S.
Unload the BCD registry hive by running the following command:
reg unload HKLM\BCD00000000
Copy the bootmgr file from the System Reserved partition to the C: Partition.
robocopy S:\ C:\ bootmgr
Copy the Boot folder from the (booting) partition to the C: partition.
robocopy S:\Boot C:\Boot /s
To update the copied BCD file so it will boot correctly, run the following command:
bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:
Remove the Drive letter (S:) from Disk Manager and Reboot.
Once the System Restarts (Booting from the C: drive now), you are now free to delete the System Reserved partition.
With only 1 active Volume now, you can assign a vDisk (in my case V) and proceed with your XenConvert imaging. Be sure to use Volume to Volume.
Lastly as noted by MWaler in his post (thanks for the pointer) , make sure to set the active partition, if not you will run into issues when booting up.
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