Well, I would have agreed with you 2 weeks ago… then I got desperate and started trying everything under the sun.
TL;DR: it worked!!!
So here is the long of it. the reason my images wouldn’t pull as “Single Disk, NTFS Only, Resizable”(SDNOR) is because the “system reserved”(rec.img.000) partition was bigger than the 100mb default, and in the wrong place on the disk (/dev/sda2 instead of sda1). so I figured I could pull the image off the machine and rearrange them and then push it back to another system; but, as you said, the “Multiple Partition, Single disk” (MPSD) pulls the MBR as well. So rearranging the partitions doesn’t work.
What I did to get it working was this.
I installed my company’s Golden Image on computer A. I installed an OEM version of Win7 Enterprise on computer B. (with default partition configuration) I resized the partitions on A to the smallest sizes I could with disk man’s NTFS Shrink I pulled a MPSD image from A; and a SPNOR image from B. I created a new image and made it SPNOR. (Call it C) I copied rec.img.000 from B’s image to C I copied d1p1.img from A’s image (the large partition with the majority of the disk on it) to C and renamed it sys.img.000 I pushed image C to computer C and lo-and-behold… wait for it… It worked!!!Now the partitions are in the right order, and properly sized, so I can create a new SPNOR image off of this computer without any problems!!!
Also as one of my colleagues suggested I checked to make sure that Bitlocker would still work and it does.
So yes, you can just rename the files in an image to change it from MPSD to SPNOR; because SPNOR doesn’t save the MBR like MPSD does. Granted you can’t go the other direction (SPNOR to MPSD) but I can’t think of a reason anyone would want to right now anyway 😃