Hi all, I'm facing the following issue with a load of machines which have been created with XP and two or three partitions. The ultimate goal is to get to a single partition Windows 7 installation while retaining the users data. I capture the userstate using hard linking which gives me a UserState folder on each partition as expected. I then need to; 1. get all the userstate hardlinks onto the drive I'm going to keep (the biggest drive) 2. destroy the small partitions while in XP using diskpart - I've scripted this bit and it works. 3. install Win 7 4. extend the single remaining partition to fill the disk - I've scripted this bit and it should work. ;-) 5. partition for bitlocker 6. restore the data to the single Windows 7 C: partition. So the questions are really around 1 and 6. How do I consololidate the hardlinks folder from multiple disks (accepting that when they move disks, it will actually be the data that moves). And also, how do I go about restoring the data afterwards. Hope I've explained that. Any thoughts anyone? Thanks Simon

Hey Simon, what's the use in creating hardlink USMT store (scanstate) on a partition you will delete when you run the restore task loadstate? i suggest doing all changes to file system before running scanstate and creating the hardlinks state store, it will look like this: 1. Copy data to the biggest drive 2. destroy the small partitions while in XP using diskpart - I've scripted this bit and it works. 3. extend the single remaining partition to fill the disk - I've scripted this bit and it should work. ;-) 4. get all the userstate hardlinks onto the drive I'm going to keep (the biggest drive) 5. install Win 7 (TS includes USMT capture and restore steps) 6. restore the data to the single Windows 7 C: partition. i excluded this step "partition for bitlocker" because i'm not familiar with bitlocker deployment during OSD.