Force windows drive letter to C:

[mark_glh]

Hi,

I’ve created an XP SP2 unattended installation which works exactly as I want except that on some pcs (usually when they have card readers or sata drives) the installation doesn’t label the windows drive as C: (it assigns the drive letter H: instead for example).

I have set the following in winnt.sif so that I can configure the format and partition options manually for each pc (this is essential for me):

[Data]

AutoPartition=0

[unattended]

FileSystem=*

I’ve looked everywhere for a solution to this, it seems I need to modify the switches passed to winnt32.exe so that /tempdrive and /syspart specify the drive to be C: but I’ve been unable to figure out how to do this. I believe it’s possible to use Win/BartsPE to do this but I’m not sure how to do that and was hoping to avoid going down that route just to force the drive letter to C: if I could.

Does anyone know of a way to do this? Having the windows drives configured as G/H is really not good for my environment.

Thanks in advance,

Mark.

[jaclaz]

You could try using (before actually installing) a PE of some kind (or maybe even DOS) and create a migrate.inf file, machine specific.

Search both here and on 911CD boards for posts by me and cdob with keyword "migrate.inf"

jaclaz

[mark_glh]

You could try using (before actually installing) a PE of some kind (or maybe even DOS) and create a migrate.inf file, machine specific.

Search both here and on 911CD boards for posts by me and cdob with keyword "migrate.inf"

jaclaz

Ah ok, you mean manually create/assign the partitions before running the unattended installation. Yeah that'd be ok - i'm struggling to find any information in your posts regarding actually doing that though. I've found plenty of information on using migrate.inf for a usb installation but none describing how to actually create one and get the cd to use it. Sorry if i'm being stupid but i've not had to mess with that before.

[jaclaz]

The "base" posts are these ones:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19663

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18782

If installing from CD, you should have a migrate.inf with a few different MBR signatures entries and manually set the actual machine HD MBR Disk Signature (i.e. bytes 1B8h through 1BBh ) to one of those:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm

with an utility such as MBRWIZ:

http://mbrwizard.com/

or MBRFIX:

http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.net/index.html

(links at bottom of page)

or any disk editor.

(mind you, completely UNLIKE tested)

Another possibility is to, AFTER install, changing the %SystemDrive% letter, which can be done, but it can be tricky.

jaclaz

[mark_glh]

The "base" posts are these ones:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19663

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18782

If installing from CD, you should have a migrate.inf with a few different MBR signatures entries and manually set the actual machine HD MBR Disk Signature (i.e. bytes 1B8h through 1BBh ) to one of those:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm

with an utility such as MBRWIZ:

http://mbrwizard.com/

or MBRFIX:

http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.net/index.html

(links at bottom of page)

or any disk editor.

(mind you, completely UNLIKE tested)

Another possibility is to, AFTER install, changing the %SystemDrive% letter, which can be done, but it can be tricky.

jaclaz

Thanks, I think that makes sense, i'll give it a try tonight.