Questions about Diskpart

[iceangel89]

i am trying out creating WIM images of my XP using IcemanND's Creating WIM images of Windows XP

and have some questions

1) is there a diffence between Volumes & Partitions?

2) to format, with the below code as an example,

Diskpart 
select disk 1 
clean 
create partition primary 
select partition 1 
active 
format fs=fat32 
assign 
exit

active is the same as make partition active in partition magic?

then assign is for? the code is not quite the same as the microsoft's site's? no drive letters? seems like the drive letter has already been assigned automatically?

from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

assign [[letter=l]/[mount=path]] [noerr]

Use the assign command to assign a letter or mount point to the current in-focus volume. If you do not specify a drive letter, the next available drive letter is assigned. If the letter or mount point is already in use, an error is generated unless you specify the noerr parameter.

The drive letter assignment is blocked on the system, boot, or paging volumes.

[jaclaz]

1) No, in this context (Primary Partition=Volume) may not be the same with Extended partition as it contains one or more Volumes.

Read here:

http://www.ranish.com/part/primer.htm

2) Yes.

assign [[letter=l]/[mount=path]] [noerr]

Use the assign command to assign a letter or mount point to the current in-focus volume. If you do not specify a drive letter, the next available drive letter is assigned. If the letter or mount point is already in use, an error is generated unless you specify the noerr parameter.

The drive letter assignment is blocked on the system, boot, or paging volumes.

jaclaz

[IcemanND]

I didn't put a drive letter in the assign statement because there are instances where the letter you may wish to use could be assigned already. so rather than have a failure I let it pick the next available letter in the script.