Creating fixed 8Gb partition from bootable CD

[Oli]

I know this question's been done to death, but I wanted to seek the opinions of people here.

I've been using bootable CDs for a few years to install Windows 2000 workstations. They're cool, as they'll happily repartition the disk and use the whole disk as one volume. Great for a workstation.

Now I'm doing installations of Windows Server 2003 and I want to create a fixed 8Gb (16Mb maybe) partition to install the OS to. I can then create extra partitions with diskpart.exe later on.

However, it looks as if I'm stuffed with bootable CDs.

I don't want to boot to DOS, use disk imaging, use a temporary FAT partition or use WinPE. The latter isn't a preference -- I can't use WinPE due to its licensing restrictions.

Any ideas anyone?