I’ve spent a good part of the last week trying to get the unis windows 7 MOE to install on a bootcamp partition. Little did I know when I started that it was a complicated process with obstacles all along the way.

To cut a long story short I could not find a way to get the iMac to boot and pull the SCCM image via the network. I even tried booting from a set of SCCM OSD dvds that the sys admin guys burnt. That too didn’t work and kept bugging out when the SCCM installer would try to set the windows partition to be active.

So…. In the end the solution that worked is as follows:
* Run bootcamp assistant to setup the partition
* Insert a standard windows installation DVD and reboot
* Hold down the “Option” key to get a boot menu
* Select the dvd and then press the “Space bar” until the windows menu appears (See previous blog on why pressing space is needed)
* Install windows, use generic info because this install will be getting overwritten with the SCCM image soon.
* Once installed, insert the SCCM OSD disk and run the autorun.
* SCCM installer will kick off and start staging the image for deployment.
* System will reboot and installation will kick off

Doing it this way seems to get around the “Setting the partition active” problem. I guess if windows is already installed then the SCCM OSD installer just skips trying to set the partition as active.

So I managed to get the unis windows 7 SCCM image deployed to a bootcamp partition of an iMac. Monday will be time to kick DeployStudio into gear and create the dual boot master images. Then try to deploy it out to some other test systems.

Everything going ok I’m hoping to be deploying dual boot images to macs by the end of next week.

After that, it’s on to setting up Munki and getting it working.