Managing Partitions when Performing an Endpoint-Initiated Deployment

Introduction

Performing an endpoint-initiated deployment enables greater management of partition layout and properties on the destination disk. Below are the different operations that can be performed when managing partitions that will be deployed to endpoint computers.

Selecting a different target disk:

If the endpoint has multiple disks, this option can be used to change the disk that will be used as the destination for the clone/restore. It is important to ensure that the correct disk is selected, deploying an image can be a destructive operation if data exists on the disk that is being deployed to.

Erasing partitions on the destination disk:

This option can be used to remove all the partitions from the destination. The 'undo' button can be used to undo a change that has been made, at any time The changes are only applied when the deployment starts.

Using 'Shrink or expand to fill the target disk':

Selected partition(s) will be copied to the target and all extendable/shrinkable partitions will be proportionately resized so all partitions fill the disk. Extendable and Shrinkable partitions are all non-system partitions, and drive C, formatted using either NTFS or FAT32. Note in the example below that the C: drive has been expanded to fill the extra space on the destination drive.

Using 'Exact partition size and offset':

Selected partition(s) will be copied to the target disk maintaining the starting positions and lengths, from left to right. If the disk is smaller than the end of the last selected partition, then the last shrinkable (NTFS or FAT32) partition is shrunk to enable all partitions to be copied. 

Dragging partitions from the source to the destination disk:

Alternatively, you can drag partitions from the source to the destination manually. This allows you to reorder the partitions as they are copied to the destination.

Using 'Fill space':

This option will expand the selected partition to fill all unpartitioned (free space on the disk which has not been allocated to a partition) to the right of the selected partition.

Manually resizing partitions:

This option can be used to manually specify the size of the selected partition.

Manually moving a partition:

This option allows you to manually drag the partition to a different location on the destination.

Using the undo button:

Any operations that have been performed on the can be undone using the 'Undo' button. None of the changes are final until the deployment begins (at which point partitions on the destination can be permanently deleted).