jjo

Been there. Done that. Didn't work. The Windows drive still came out as C. But thanks, anyway.

Having tried the following, I'm about to give up and give in to Microsoft's insistence that Windows 7 be installed on drive C if it is the only OS on a hard disk. Starting from a blank hard drive I created two partitions, a 100MB primary partition and an extended partition covering the rest of the drive. Within the extended partition I created several 36MB logical partitions followed by one more logical partition that took up the rest of the extended partition. In other words, the whole drive is partitioned. I formatted the 100MB partition and all the 36MB partitions FAT32 and formatted the big, remaining partition as NTFS. The idea here is to follow cluberti's advice to put several volumes ahead of the last one in the hope that the Windows 7 installer will see them, give them drive letters in sequence, and load Windows 7 into the last one with the desired drive letter. What was the drive arrangement after the install completed? When all was said and done the 100MB primary partition had become the hidden system partition (as expected) and Windows 7 was installed on the large logical partition at the end of the drive, which was called, to my disappointment, drive C. All the other drives were there with drive letters D, E, etc. The Windows installer either didn't recognize the extra logical, formatted partitions as volumes or didn't care. Either way, failure. I'm still interested in finding out a way to accomplish my goal, but I think I will have to defer it for now.

cluberti, I think you are on the right track as the insertion of additional volumes ahead of the installation volume is essentially how I was able to load previous versions of Windows to a drive L. However, my attempts to do the same with a Windows 7 installation have not been successful. Perhaps I just haven't been doing this the right way. One thing I tried, for example, was to create three partitions -- the first a small primary partition for the system files (which the Windows 7 install apparently likes to create otherwise), the second an extended partition which I divided into several logical drives, and the third a large primary partition for installing the OS. There were enough logical drives ahead of the third partition that it would have been given the letter L if all of them were named in order. However, to my disappointment, it ended up as drive C, as usual. If you know of a better way, please tell me and I'll try it. For some reason this was a lot easier with previous Windows OS's. Other comments: 1. When this does work, I delete all the stub logical drives and merge them all into the first partition, so I end up with a small C drive with a few system files followed by a large L drive with the bulk of the OS and data files. This required a trivial adjustment to the boot.ini file, but then everything was fine. 2. I tried changing the letter of the Windows 7 C drive after an install but the OS won't allow this. 3. Based on a suggestion from someone on another forum I used the WAIK to create an "Autounattend.xml" file to use during the install from DVD process. This file is intended to facilitate automated installations but I used it because it offers the possibility to set many more options than the normal setup procedure. In it I told the setup to create two partitions, one for the system files and one for Windows 7, and to given them the drive letters C and L, respectively. The install, starting from a blank disk, worked fine, but alas, when it was all over the system files were in a hidden partition (of the size I specified) with no drive letter and the Windows 7 files were in the next partition (also as I specified) as drive C. I know the install paid at least some attention to what I specified in the .xml file because the system partition was formatted FAT32 as I had instructed. jjo

MrJinje, I think you are being unnecessarily pessimistic about the configurability of the install. I know with certainty that what you said is not correct in respect to Win XP, Win 2K, and Win NT because I've installed each of those OS's on the drive L many times in the past. It takes a little effort but is otherwise completely straightforward. However the same technique does not work with Vista or Windows 7. I tried. Furthermore the documentation for WAIK indicates that it is possible to specify the installation drive letter (e.g., search for "Letter" in "readme_WAIK.rtf", which you can get here). vLite seems to make a lot of customizations easier. I'm just wondering if the destination drive letter is one of them. jjo

I've posted this question to a couple other Windows 7 forums but haven't gotten a useful answer yet. I stumbled upon the vLite web page and think this might be the way to go, if I can get a little help. My very simple request: I have a brand new hard disk on which I would like to install fresh copy of Windows 7 (Enterprise Edition), but unlike most people, I actually want to install the OS to a drive other than C, let's say drive L. From what I've read so far I gather that the drive letter for the installation is specified somewhere on the installation DVD, but that this can be changed if you know how to create a suitably customized installation DVD. WAIK is apparently one way to do this, but I'm put off by the extra complexity of the WAIK process. I'm hoping there's an easy way to do this using vLite. Can anyone enlighten me? Thanks, jjo