Introduction

Sometimes things don’t go as planned, when creating a new task sequence to deploy Windows 8 on a New Computer with no partitions I got a catastrophic failure after selecting the Task Sequence. The reason was simple but I wanted to document it.

Problem

In  Configuration Manager 2012 SP1, I created a new Task Sequence to Deploy Windows 8 and it failed on a new computer immediately with the following error logged in SMSTS.log

Partition 1 larger than remaining disk space. Requested partition size: <X>, remaining size: <Value_smaller_than_X> OSDDiskPart
LoadPartitionConfiguration( i, oDisk, cbDiskSize, cbContainerPartitionSize, pCurPartition), HRESULT=8000ffff (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\osddiskpart\main.cpp,751) OSDDiskPart
LoadDiskConfiguration(oDisk), HRESULT=8000ffff (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\osddiskpart\main.cpp,1412) OSDDiskPart
Invalid configuration specified.  Please ensure that the task sequence is properly configured. OSDDiskPart
OSDDiskPart.exe failed: 0x8000ffff OSDDiskPart
Process completed with exit code 2147549183 TSManager
!——————————————————————————————–! TSManager
Failed to run the action: Partition Disk.
Catastrophic failure (Error: 8000FFFF; Source: Windows) TSManager
The execution of the group (Install Operating System) has failed and the execution has been aborted. An action failed.
Operation aborted (Error: 80004004; Source: Windows) TSManager
Failed to run the last action: Partition Disk. Execution of task sequence failed.
Catastrophic failure (Error: 8000FFFF; Source: Windows) TSManager

Long story short, the Primary partition (for the OS) was hard coded to 30368MB in size, see screenshot below and the hard disc in my new computer (a virtual machine) was set to 27GB, and that figure was smaller than the hard coded figure hence the failure !

Solution

To fix this, edit the task sequence and double click on the primary partition that is hard coded to 30368MB. Change that step to use all of the remaining space and apply your changes. Reboot the computer you are trying to image and all should be ok.

Summary

This problem seems to occur only when you use an image with more than one index and you select “All Images” in the Install Windows part of the Task Sequence creation wizard

I believe the source of this 30368MB quoted in the title of this blog post is the expanded size of the captured image being deployed in the task sequence,  as a result the hard coded figure you might see could be a smaller or bigger fixed size in your task sequence, (confirmed from another user)

I hope this helps !

cheers

niall