The organization for which I work has many representatives across the nation, all of which use a machine that they purchase. After they purchase their system, it comes directly to us, where we re-image them with our Windows 8.1 Enterprise. The issue we are facing is that in the event of a representatives termination, we would like to remove Enterprise and all of the applications we install, while leaving their files alone.
What we would like to do, and have been testing, is immediately upon arrival of a representative's machine, we create a CustomRefresh on an external drive using the following:
mkdir z:\RefreshImage
recimg -CreateImage z:\RefreshImage
After we create the image, we blast our version of Windows Enterprise on and send the machine out. Our own image changes the partitions, taking them down from five to two. In our testing, we have tried to Refresh using our original CustomRefresh from when we received the machine. In order to use our CustomRefresh, we have been doing the following:
recimg /setcurrent z:\RefreshImage
We have then proceeded to complete a refresh as normal. The refresh appears to be completing normally until we log back in and it tells us that there was a problem refreshing the machine and no changes were made.
We have tried the external drive method, as well copying the .wim directly onto the C:\ and setting it to that location, but we have been unsuccessful thus far and it has left us with a few questions:
- Is it possible to use Refresh to install the factory version of Windows 8.1 Pro after we have re-imaged with Windows Enterprise?
- Is the changing of the partitions what has affected our ability to successfully Refresh our machines?
- Is there something with the Refresh process that requires that the image used to Refresh the PC come from the same hardware? Same version of Windows? Same domain?
Thank you very much for taking the time to read through my question and I would greatly appreciate any information you can provide.