Drive Letters Change on Reboot

[rjweaver]

Hello,

I am having a problem with drive letters changing on me. (Which is not good)

A little background information:

4 Drives total

2 Logical Drives (2 drives set up on Raid-1 and 2 drives set up on Raid-0)

Logical Drive 0:

C primary partition (OS)

D primary partition (APP)

Logical Drive 1:

E primary partition (LOG)

I'm using diskpart to manually create these partitions. I get everything set up, and then when I reboot back into a PE environment this is what happens:

Logical Drive 0:

E primary partition (OS)

C primary partition (APP)

Logical Drive 1:

D primary partition (LOG)

Perhaps this is because I'm using all primary partitions maybe? I want to use all primary partitions if possible. Any advice out there?

Thank you in Advance.

[campbrs]

This is normal behavior.

If you partition the drives in Windows PE the drive letters are only significant to Windows PE and the drive letter mappings to the volumes numbers will not carry over after a reboot as this information is stored in the registry - (I may be incorrect on the location but it is significant to the OS that is presently running on the system).

So after you partition in WinPE and you level WinPE to build your new system the partitions get reset to default during Windows setup.

Default is:

first formated volume on first Drive is C:

first formated volume on second Drive is D:

second formated volume on first drive is E:

and honestly I have never gone beyond this so I would not know if F: would goto a 3rd formated volume on the first drive or the 2nd formated volume on the 2nd drive

But you can get the idea.

To get around this issue in my build scripts I actually generate a post installation diskpart answer file that I run in the cmdline.txt file which is run during the final phase of installation. You will need to build this file in parallel with the initial diskpart file.

My guess to why your OS is being moved to E: is that it is the second formated volume on the first drive so you will need to partition this partition before you partition your "d" drive. You cannot move the System partition once Windows has been installed so you will need to fix this during the inital partitioning in Windows PE.

So to fix the D: and E: issue you will need to "move" both volume's letters and then "move" the correct letter to the correct drive.

So something like this:

select disk 1

select partition 1

assign letter h

select disk 0

select partition 2

assign letter d

select disk 1

select partition 1

assign letter e

exit

This will work for windows 2000 and XP but not 2003 and later

with 2003 you must "remove" the letters prior to assigning them

using the "remove letter" command.

select disk 1

select partition 1

remove letter

select disk 0

select partition 2

remove letter

assign letter d

select disk 1

select partition 1

assign letter e

exit

Note sometimes the CDROM letters get in the way as well so you may need to "move" these out of the way as well. If you have one IDE CDROM in the system (and no newer Remote Access cards (i.e. DRAC4, etc)) this is pretty easy as the drive is almost alwqays volume 0. If you system is more complex then it may be a little difficult to figure this out.

Simple setup:

select volume 0

assign letter r

or for 2003 and later

select volume 0

remove letter

assign letter r

Hope this helps.

-RC

[jaclaz]

Have a look at these threads (and related links) where the lettering problem has been discussed:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=70405

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33964

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=67395

jaclaz