Hi. Couldn't find answer in search.

DISM docs tell that system partition can be captured but not required. For OEM computers we decided to capture images for all partitions (except for MSR). However after applying wim file to system partition Windows fails to boot. After some research it appeared that BCD had missing 'osdevice' and 'device' attributes. After setting them to correct partitions Windows booted fine.

1. Are there any special procedures to apply system partition image or it is not supported at all?

Also on OEM laptops that we have system partitions containing OEM folders (for example EFI/ASUS/ with a BCD file and some asboot.tag). That's why we wanted to have this partitions imaged...

2. Do you know  what these folders are used for?

Thank you!

You do not need to capture the system partition. If Windows was installed to a system and the system partition already exists (and that the OS is in a deployable state at capture) then it must be deployed to a similar setup. Windows, when sysprepped, it smart enough to know to recreate the boot files in the system partition. You just need to run BCDBoot and specify the system partition after deploying the Windows image and before rebooting.

If you are only interested in the OS itself, this should be enough. But if Asus has some custom stuff in there (like it can boot into something else, like a lite-Linux version which I have seen) then that won't be available on the new hardware.

If you capture the EFI partition, you will end up locking your image to a fixed disk size. I ran into this during testing last year on UEFI deployments. I had installed Windows to GPT on a 500GB disk. I captured the Windows and EFI partition. The image would only boot if deployed to another 500GB disk and not any other size. But since I discovered you only need to capture the os, it didn't matter to me after that.

Thank you for the answer!

Indeed, I just need to install on the same type machine and same HDD size so it should not be a problem. The problem is that after applying image to system partition BCD is broken. Tried to dig deeper but technet articles contradict each other (some say that it is optional, some that EFI system partition should not be imaged, some even have examples on how to do it;))

For now, I am fixing 'osdevice' and 'device' entries after applying system partition images using bcdedit. 

Hi,

You can use bcdboot command to repair BCD.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824874.aspx

For BCDBoot, you apply the settings to the system partition, which if using the tutorials is given the S: designation, and the OS volume gets W. This command for example:

BCDBoot.exe w:\windows /s s: /f all