DISKPART-like utility for Windows NT?

[Taed Wynnell]

We have a large number of remote Windows NT Server systems that we want to
wipe clean and replace with a Windows Server 2003 disk image. To do that,
we were considering doing something like:
-- Create a new bootable partition
-- Copy a WinPE disk image into it
-- Mark the WinNT partition as not bootable
-- Reboot the system, thus booting into WinPE
-- Delete the old WinNT disk partition
-- Create a new Win2003 disk partition
-- Copy the disk image into the Win2003 disk partition
-- Reboot and we're done!

We've done the latter steps previously, so we're not bothered by the WinPE
work.

But to get there, we need to be able to create a new bootable partition from
within WinNT itself. I can't seem to find a standard WinNT DISKPART-like
command-line tool to do that.

Does anyone know of such a tool? I found AEFDISK32, but I want to see what
all my options are.

Does anyone have a better way of doing what I'm after? Note that we're not
using a "setup" image -- it's a raw disk image that will be personalized in
other ways.

Thanks in advance!

 

[John John]

You might get some ideas in the articles here:

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...b4602ff8eef?lnk=st&q=&rnum=3#dc589b4602ff8eef

I'm not too sure why you want or need to do this partition work from
within NT.

John

Taed Wynnell wrote:

> We have a large number of remote Windows NT Server systems that we want to
> wipe clean and replace with a Windows Server 2003 disk image. To do that,
> we were considering doing something like:
> -- Create a new bootable partition
> -- Copy a WinPE disk image into it
> -- Mark the WinNT partition as not bootable
> -- Reboot the system, thus booting into WinPE
> -- Delete the old WinNT disk partition
> -- Create a new Win2003 disk partition
> -- Copy the disk image into the Win2003 disk partition
> -- Reboot and we're done!
>
> We've done the latter steps previously, so we're not bothered by the WinPE
> work.
>
> But to get there, we need to be able to create a new bootable partition from
> within WinNT itself. I can't seem to find a standard WinNT DISKPART-like
> command-line tool to do that.
>
> Does anyone know of such a tool? I found AEFDISK32, but I want to see what
> all my options are.
>
> Does anyone have a better way of doing what I'm after? Note that we're not
> using a "setup" image -- it's a raw disk image that will be personalized in
> other ways.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
>