Server 2012 Autounattend.xml - make offline drives online?

Solution 1:

This could be because the San policy is set to ‘OfflineShared’ by default for some SKUs of Windows server. This is the default setting because if the disks are shared between servers (unless part of a cluster), data corruption can occur if the setting is changed to ‘OnlineAll’.

This Microsoft Support article explains the issue and has this example unattend snippet to show you how to do this:

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-PartitionManager" 
publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" 
language="neutral" 
versionScope="nonSxS" 
processorArchitecture="x86"> 
<SanPolicy>1</SanPolicy> 
</component>

There is also a warning to reset this policy back to ‘OfflineShared’ after the installation to avoid the data corruption issues that can occur.

While this document is specifically for Windows Server 2008/2008R2, this still relates to Windows Server 2012 as seen in this TechNet article.

Also, in the autounattend.xml section that you posted, you are marking partitions active on those other disks. Unless you are going to boot to other OS’s on those disks, you should avoid marking those partitions as active.

More information on using answer files to deploy Windows can be found at the Springboard Series pages on TechNet.

Hope this helps