I am building an XP SP3 OSD image for our VMWare environment. VMWare recommends, for performance, that when creating the virtual machine, the disk should be "block aligned", so the the partition starting offset is 65,536 bytes. Once that is done, apply your operating system as usual. When I drop my OSD WIM down on this virtual machine, with the 64k offset above, Windows reports the partition starting offset (per System Tools-System Information-Components-Storage-Disks) is 8,225,280 bytes, nothing near what I set it to, which is 65,536 bytes. Using a Windows XP SP3 iso and booting/building the O/S from the same Virtual machine reflects exactly the 65,536 bytes offset. So it seems that OSD already offsets the image, by almost 8mb. How can I remove the offset that OSD creates and get it back to just using my manual offset?

WIMs are not bit based copies of a partition and thus have nothing to do with the physical nature of the partition including the offset. WIMs are file based and are essentially CAB files with some embedded meta-data to store a few WIM specific details. THis offers huge benefits because it completely decouples the physical properties of a volume from the OS which makes sense and gives you the ability to define this at deployment time instead of build time. To set the parition properties you must either use the format & parition task (which I don't think allows you to set the offset) or use diskpart in a command-line task.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys

Jason. I used diskpart to set the alignment/offset, creating the partition with this command line: Create Primary Partition Align=64 (for a 64k offset) Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.