Unattend install to specific drive letter?

[johnwinterflood]

Hi, I hate to admit defeat but I am close to giving up on trying to get an unattended install from a copy of XP on a hard drive to a specific drive letter. I wonder if anyone here can offer some advice. The strange thing is that I have a couple of other machines in which the standard approach seems to work (although now I don't understand how it could have worked), but I cannot get it to work on this system.

The starting point is a system with two drives, the first one has drive letter C: and is formatted FAT32 and has a well working XP installation as well as a soft copy of the Windows XP CD. The second drive has letter Z: (set by right-click on My_Computer/Manage, Disk_Management, right-click on second drive, Change_Drive_Letter...) and I wish to install a copy of Windows on to this drive WITHOUT changing its drive letter to C: or D: in the process!

As I understand it, the main thing necessary is to pass WINNT32.EXE the option "/tempdrive:Z:" and I do this with a command in a batch file as follows:

Batch file "InstallToZ.bat"

set AnswerFile=.\InstallToZ.txt

set SetupFiles=..\..\OemXpSp2\i386

%SEtupFiles%\winnt32 /s:%SetupFiles% /unattend:%AnswerFile% /copysource:lang /tempdrive:Z: /cmd:InstApps.bat /dudisable

However when I run this it insists on calling the second drive D: and installing it as D:

Earlier on in my attempts I had the additional option "/syspart:Z:" but now I understand that this option is intended for when one wants to remove the drive from the computer it was installed from and plug it into another computer. So having this option present makes it install to the second drive and call it C: so that when it boots up it runs as C: and calls the first drive (previously C:) D: instead. The remarkable thing is that on my other two systems it seemed to work fine with this option present!

Another thing I found after pouring over the deploy.chm and ref.chm documentation, is that there is a line in the unattend.txt file which causes it to install to the first available partition (presumably ignoring the "/tempdrive:Z:" option?!). This line is:

[Data]

AutoPartition=1

I tried changing this to 0 instead of 1 with no effect. However on my other systems, it is happy to install to the drive I specified in /tempdrive regardless of this line.

The documentation also suggests a couple of other lines that maybe should be changed:

MsDosInitiated=0

;0=Unattended Setup is running directly from Windows product CD (not true!).

UnattendedInstall=Yes

;Yes=Unattended Setup is running directly from Windows product CD (not true!).

However these lines cause no problem with my other system, and the documentation does not give a situation when you would use "MsDosInitiated=1" or "UnattendedInstall=No" in an unattend.txt file!

One difference I noted between the systems which work and the system which doesn't, is that the systems which work have several partitions on both drives. So I tried partitioning the second drive and installing XP to the second partition on it, but no joy. It reassigns letters to all drives and partitions.

Another difference is that on the systems which work, all formatted partitions on both drives are NTFS, whereas on the system which doesn't work the first drive is FAT32. However since I am not yet ready to format the first drive (until I get the second one working the way I want it), I don't want to partition or reformat it yet.

As an almost last resort, after it had installed to the second drive as C:, I tried getting into the registry from that installation and changing C: to Z: and D: to C:. (I have no doubt that I was successful here as I have fiddled at this level before several times). After doing this, I tried to reinstall to the second drive using the "repair" option hoping that it would read the registry and try to restore things according to the drive letters found there. But even this did not work!!!

My last resort will be to boot from the CD itself and do it the pedestrian way (which I am assuming will work!), but I would really like to solve this problem for the future.

An interesting question relative to this problem is, how does WINNT32 determine what drive letter goes with what partition after the first restart? Does it have to search for and read registry entries from previous installations?

And another question is why does it spend so long "scanning C drive" after the first boot - is it actually scanning the first (old C:) drive or the second (new C:?) drive and what is it scanning it for!