setup-storage and windows 7

[Gémes Géza]

Hi,

After some digging of the mail archives I've found that my problem is
quite general:

Partitioning with fai a disk which had windows 7 installed and trying to
preserve that installation.

Because I do a scripted install for Windows 7 (PXEboot WinPE which
mounts a share and then executes a batch from then which does the
partitioning (with diskpart) and then calls setup with an unattended.xml
file) I was able to experiment different partitioning schemes (including
with and without the unfamous 100MB partition, creating the ntfs
partition(s) (before windows install) from parted with cylinder
alignment and without, and then only formating from winpe). I think that
windows 7 BCD bootloader won't be able to boot Windows 7 from an even
slightly modified/recreated partition. So what I propose/asking for:
would it be possible to do a not only preserve partitions, but also a
preserve partition table approach. This way the setup-storage tool
meeting the preserve-partitioning entry would not create a new
partitioning table recreating the partitions to be preserved, but would
collect the partitions which would not need to be preserved, execute a
rm on them, and then create the new ones as before.

I wouldn't call myself a perl expert, but if someone volunteers to give
me some pointers in the code, and be patient with me I would give a try
to implement the proposed approach.

I would also welcome any criticism to this approach, or alternative ways
(without modifying setup-storage).

Thank you in advance!

Geza