Questions about Winpeshl

[Rbcc56]

My Winpeshl consists of 

Startnet.cmd

dopartition.bat 

Apply-win.bat

Make-Dir.bat 

%systemdrive% \sources\setup.exe

 

Question 1  Do the quotes in   : %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\System32\diskpart.exe, /s  %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\System32\diskpart.txt  go around "/s %systemdrive....."  or just the "%Systemdrive....at the end?Pa

 

Question 2  Can I use Partition letter "A" in the partitions.txt file.  Or is that only for the disk drive [Which I don't have one]?

 

Question 3:  I only used Disk letters :  C,A,T,U,D  but when it Runs Windows  in VMWare Workstation `17.6.2 It has completely different letter C,D,E,F,G  Why?

 

TIA 

[Tripredacus]

4 hours ago, Rbcc56 said:

Question 3:  I only used Disk letters :  C,A,T,U,D  but when it Runs Windows  in VMWare Workstation `17.6.2 It has completely different letter C,D,E,F,G  Why?

WinPE reassigns all volume letters based on the order in which the volumes are enumerated. Typically it goes in ascending order from Volume 0, but there are some instances (on real hardware) where a volume (or disk) is not made available at the same time every time and those letters can change. Because of this, I usually recommend that only the disk that is meant to be imaged (or worked) is connected when booting to WinPE.

[Rbcc56]

Questions :

Does it matter which version of Windows that you use?  I noticed that your  on Win 7  and the base machine is Windows 11?

Is there a way to circumvent the way windows enumerate the drives? if so how?

[Tripredacus]

Which version of Windows, or WinPE? The only real difference I know is that in the WinPE based on Win11, it won't assign a drive letter to an OS volume. This effects both ADK built WinPE as well as the PE that Setup uses from the install media. For which WinPE to use in general, I had typically stuck with whatever the most recent one that was needed for whatever purpose and typically that would work with previous versions of Windows but I would keep old builds around for legacy purposes. 

If you are referring to OS option on my profile card, that is just reflective of the computer I tend to post on the forum from. My regular internet usage computer is Win7 x64 but my gaming/streaming computer and my dev notebook run a Windows 10 equivalent, my security notebook runs Linux and I believe my imaging server runs Server 2019 Standard. I manage a Windows 11 computer also but you can only put 1 thing into the profile card. 

Not currently possible to circumvent enumeration. I don't even want to think about what would be required to change it.  I don't think that it is impossible to do but it probably wouldn't be worth the effort unless you were really bored. Usually you just have to make the best with what you have and apply workarounds if you need to use them. Some of those workarounds that I have had to do in the past include:
- always changing C volume to another letter on first boot into WinPE because it will assign USB drives and some unpopulated card readers to letter C which can interfere with some deployment scenarios.
- having to make alternate deploy profiles for situations where WinPE enumerated Disk 0 as something other than the disk the OS is supposed to be deployed to.

Methods of controlling drive letters include:
- Using PXE to boot WinPE instead of from USB.
- Using mapped network drives to be the places where OS images and applications would be stored.

[Rbcc56]

I am using winpeshl.ini and placing it into Dos. Wim and inside of Winpeshl.ini I have 6 files shown below:

winpeshl.ini

These will be inserted into Windows/System32 of boot.wim.  I will use 7zip to do this.  The Problem is that during installation of Windows it says that it create every partition and the mount point for every partition. 

Then windows is ran after installation is through the Drive letters CGDEF are used why is this?   Can I  have the Drive I created Used?? John

apply-win.bat dopartition.bat EndWinPE.bat Make-dir.bat partitions.txt startnet.cmd

Edited 10 hours ago by Rbcc56