Right, this is an interesting one.

I'm using WinPE to set up a number of PCs of varying vintage and manufacturer.

Some machines have internal IDE ZIP drives. Most don't.

I'm configuring the hard disk with two partitions, one for the system and another for the profiles, so I'm using the ProfilesDir= unattend setting.

I'm running into a situation similar to MS KB 321801with the ZIP drives - the ZIP drive 'takes over' the D: drive letter (which I want to be the second hard disk partition) and setup fails (because the device is not ready - at that point there is no ZIP disk in the drive; why should there be!?!)

So, my question is this: how on earth can I stop the ZIP drive from grabbing D: during setup?

the easiest way would be to disconect it during the install. I have a similar problem with some machines where it istalls windows on the hard drive but assigns c: to the zip drive, so I just disconnect the power until I'm finished reloading the machine.

You can probably deal with this with a vbs file. Let me see if I can cough something up

Edit: couldn't find any solutions yet, it's also difficult for me to test because I don't have a ZIP-drive myself.