Avoiding A Potential Error Associated With A Windows Vista Deployment; Creating A 1 Mb-Aligned Partition - HP Pro 6305 Installation Manual

Avoiding a potential error associated with a Windows Vista deployment

Applications built on the Extensible Storage Engine API (ESENT) that run on a Windows Vista-based
system may report errors. For example, running Windows Update, which is an ESENT application,
may result in the following error:
FATAL: Failed to initialize datastore, error = 0xC8000222
If you receive an error when running an ESENT application on a Windows Vista system, review
Knowledge Base article KB2470478, which provides a fix-on-failure patch. If your application is
listed in this article, apply the patch.

Creating a 1 MB-aligned partition

By default, the following create partitions that are 1 MB-aligned:
 Windows Vista SP1 and later
 Windows 7
 WinPE 1.6 and later 5
This section provides guidelines for achieving proper partition alignment when deploying XP on HP
systems.
Warning concerning KB931760
Using Knowledge Base article KB931760 causes DiskPart to create misaligned partitions on HP
systems. Thus, because KB931760 is not needed if proper deployment steps have been followed, its
application should be blocked in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and Microsoft System Center
Configuration Manager (SCCM).
Important
Do not use KB931760 on an HP system.
KB931760 is a registry patch for WinPE that was designed to address the following: "You cannot
install Windows XP successfully after you use Windows Vista or Windows PE 2.0 to create partitions
on a hard disk." This problem, which only occurs with certain BIOS firmware, happens because
Windows XP and Windows PE 2.0 create disk partitions differently than Windows XP.
According to the article, the patch was intended to prevent a BSOD when deploying Windows XP
with ImageX on some vendors' systems. However, if you follow the recommended deployment steps
(Deploying Windows XP on an HP system), the BSOD will not occur on HP systems, thus the patch
need not be applied.
Note
If you need to create an unaligned partition for test purposes, you can use
KB931760 to modify the WinPE registry and then use DiskPart to create a
partition.
5 Versions of WinPE prior to 2.1 do not provide support for Advanced Format drives. However, you can use an earlier version to create a
partition if you supply the align=1024 parameter to DiskPart's Create command.
7