Hi all, not 100% sure this is the right place to post as its sort of win PE

im using Microsoft MDT 2010 and it all works great.

im wondering if its possible to change/made a script to manualy pick the hard drive and partiton to install on.

Thanks Michael

MDT2010 uses the "Format and Partition Disk" step in the "New Computer Only" section of the "Preinstall" phase to determine what/how to format and partitioin the disk. You could try disabling or deleting that step, but I've not checked to see what will happen.

I have tried simply disabling or deleteing it just comes up with error sayin basicly no partition to install onto, the options for picking the hard drive/ partition all seem to have to be pre defined

i was thinkin along the lines of a script file to make a basic GUI to choose partiton to format

I have been lookin through the code im "DeployWiz_Definition_ENU.xml" this is the main wizard file. usingMDT Wizard Editor i can see the option for picking the hard drive/partition is there but seemingly only active when upgrading.

would it be possible to change the code to make it active and to choose the partition on a "NEWCOMPUTER" install? im not much use with XML coding

Thanks Michael

Honestly, not sure - would be worth asking over at the Deployment Guys' blog. However, if you had a portable partition/format app that ran as an .exe, you could probably insert it into the task sequence before that point and disable the task sequence pre-existing partition/format step. It could work, I would think.

Think il be scraping the idea, at least for now and look at alternates.

I was able to get this to work by using Partition Wizard, for what it's worth.

sounds intresting. how would i go about seting it up?

The download for Partition Wizard is self contained once installed on a test machine (or extracted from it's inno setup package - see innounp if you want to just extract it). Add the app to the \Scripts folder in the DeploymentShare or mount the PE WIM and add it to \Program Files there and unmount/commit, and then in the task sequence call a .cmd that runs "start /w <path to exe>" (you'll have to create this in the \Scripts folder of the deployment share - if you call the .exe directly, the task sequence won't pause and once the .exe launches, it'll continue and fail) as a task in the same location as the New Computer partition task (disable the partition/format task itself).

Rebuild your WIMs, and try again - instead of automatic formatting at that point in the task sequence, you should get a Partition Wizard GUI popping up which will allow you to partition/format the drive.

Cool thanks i will give that a try now

Hey, I have copied all the Partition wizard files into the boot wim's and inserted a command in the task sequence, the files are all in the wim and i have also tried manualy running partitonwizard.exe from a command prompt but it fails to load.

ive been thinking even if i can get it to manualy format the partition, would it know that the partiton i formated was the one to copy files to? im thinkin it wouldnt.

It worked here - I made sure to install it on my machine first, and then run it once, and then copy the program files folder to the PE image (if you put it in the PE itself, it's X:\<path>, as it's running from the RAMdrive). As to what drive to install to, it simply starts at drive 0/partition0 and looks for a volume large enough to hold the files, and installs on the first one it finds, and it does this in one of the WSF files that runs at that point to bootstrap the installer.

Cool it worked! i was using %SCRIPTROOT% for the path to script folder when i told it the exact path it works great. thanks a lot

What's the error in the task sequence log on the machine?

Can you explain how to obtain Partition Wizard please ?