I fully sympathise with your pain. This has been driving me crazy for several weeks. What's most annoying is that bcdboot isn't on any of my Windows Server 2008 boxes, despite every guide online saying it should be.
My situation is that we are unable to run a PXE server (long story) so have to manually apply the Windows image with WinPE. The image appears to apply OK, but when rebooting I get error "BOOTMGR is missing".
I tried booting into WinPE and replacing my Boot Configuration with the Boot Configuration Data Store Editor by running:
bcdedit /import X:\Windows\System32\config\BCD-Template
But this didn't work.
However, I am happy to say that I have now resolved this problem!
It's not terribly easy; you will need a working machine running the OS you are trying to install (either Windows 7 or Server 2008), as well as a remote server to copy the Boot Sector information to and from.
First off boot into the working machine with a winpe disk.
Run
net use Z: \REMOTEMACHINE\Share
then
XCOPY C: Z:\BOOTMGRBACKUP\ /H /S
Now log on to the machine you want to build with a winpe disk.
Then run your excellently notated script above to create a 100Mb active partition and another partition which takes up the remainder of the disk.
Depending how you are installing the image you will either map a drive or access a CD, then apply the image with IMAGEX (I'm not going to go over this here, as it is covered extensively elsewhere) to apply the image to the D:.
We now need to get the BOOTMGR partition onto the 100Mb acive partition.
Run
net use Z: \REMOTEMACHINE\Share
XCOPY Z:\BOTMGRBACKUP\ c: /H /S /Y
This will copy the BOOTMGR information across, but there will be some information missing (not sure why this is).
Now run
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:
run bcdedit /set {default} device partition=D:
run bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=D:
Reboot the box and you should be in Windows!
While @TheCompWiz's answer is good, I'd like to add my own version based on my own personal experience.
When you think about automating Windows deployments (anything Vista/2008 and beyond), it helps to separate the actual installation bits from the delivery of the installation bits to the destination machine. A Windows 7 DVD is the standard delivery mechanism for the default set of Windows 7 installation bits. It contains a small WinPE image (boot.wim) that loads on boot which is then responsible for writing the actual OS image (install.wim) down to the hard drive. Windows Deployment Services is also just a delivery mechanism. It can host both the boot.wim and install.wim so that clients can do the installation directly over the network with no physical media necessary.
But delivery of the installation bits is only a small part of the story. Creating your custom "image" (though it's really more of a hybrid image/automated installation) is generally what takes the most time and what most people care about. Others have mentioned using Sysprep to create your custom image. But using it directly and manually editing things like unattend.xml is way more trouble than it's worth. At the end of the day, many of the free and paid solutions for customizing Windows deployments are just wrappers and pre-made scripts that all tie back to Sysprep.
My personal favorite free tool for making custom Windows deployments is the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) which recently released version 2012. All it really is is a bunch of pre-made scripts and some GUIs that work together with the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) to help you build your automated installation. You then have a variety of choices on how to deliver that installation to your clients (WDS boot.wim, bootable CD/DVD, bootable USB key, etc).
Out of the box, it's really not that difficult to build a quick image with some drivers, patches, and applications. Where it shines though is once you dig into making your own custom scripts. The sky is really the limit here. In my previous job, we were using it to deploy a single Windows 7 x64 image to about 1000 machines from multiple hardware vendors including dual-boot MacBooks and iMacs. MDT is really one of my favorite Microsoft products of all time. And did I mention it's free?
Best Answer
It sounds to me like FOG is starting the process and then fails on the image which will wipe out the boot sector. I would image the computer and watch it to see where it fails in it's process, usually watching the machine being imaged will give you a pretty good idea of what's failing.
Since you created the image with FOG 0.33 which used partimage and FOG now uses Partclone you would have had to enable the FOG_FORMAT_FLAG_IN_GUI in General Settings and the set the image to partimage. If this is the case you would see a this is not a partclone image error.
I'd also recommend upgrading to 1.2.0 as that fixed some remaining minor issues I still had with 1.1.2.