HOWTO Enable 8dot3 names when deploying Windows 7 with WinPE 4

8dot3 names are becoming less and less useful and is no longer enabled by default by Microsoft.

Here is one of the reason given in this article:
"The creation of 8.3 filenames and directories for all long filenames and directories on NTFS partitions may decrease directory enumeration performance. An 8.3-compliant file name refers to MS-DOS file-naming conventions. These conventions restrict file names to eight characters and restrict optional extensions to three characters."

A while ago we had an issue that 8dot3 names were no longer there. It turned out that the cause of the issue was that we had  mounted, edited and committed our WIM on a 2008R2 server where 8dot3 naming was disabled by default.
This caused some issues with some scripts relying on 8dot3 naming being present.

To check if 8dot3 names are present or not on a machine simply run
DIR /X C:\

It is important to check the root of the system drive because since the program files folder is always copied from the WIM to the disk this indicate whether the 8dot3 names are included in the WIM or not. Depending on how the following registry value is set you could have 8dot3 names created for new folder but missing for existing folders. All the details can be found in this TechNet article.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation

Now, starting with WinPE 4.0 even if you have captured a WIM with 8dot3 names enabled, after you apply your image with an MDT or SCCM task sequence that uses WinPE 4, in other words relying on ADK 8, 8dot3 names are disabled again when the disk is formatted.

To work around this problem you can add a Run Command step in your task sequence with the command:
cmd /c format %OSDISK% /fs:ntfs /q /v:SYSTEM /s:enable /y

Here is a link to the technet forum post were this solution is detailed. All credits goes to them.